E-Bike in the Quilt Shop

I cycled out of Winterset at 6:45 on Wednesday, July 24, with 18,000 other registered RAGBRAI riders, my feet firmly on the pedals of my fully charged TREK Verve +. My team (Team Card Sharks, but that’s another story) included me, my daughter Rebecca, and Rebecca’s husband Jack, both 42. Our destination was Knoxville, 75 miles away, with 3041 feet of elevation to climb.

Team Card Sharks, Jack with coffee from Petite Café in hand, ready to ride to the small town of St. Charles, Iowa, 13.8 miles southeast of Winterset. Rebecca and Jack had never been on RAGBRAI before, but their bikes (two classic Bianchis) participated in The Great Bike Ride back in the 1990s.

For my non-Iowa readers, RAGBRAI is an annual, week-long bike tour across my home state of Iowa. The route, always from our western border on the Missouri River to our eastern border on the Mighty Mississippi, changes every year. The distance averages around 468 miles. For RAGBRAI LI (year 51), Winterset was the overnight stop for Day Three.

Zooming down the beautiful, long descent to the first turn (onto St. Charles road), I laughed out loud, transported to past years, when I was a stalwart bead on the long, long string of riders stretching from one overnight town to the next.

In St. Mary’s (pop. 104), Rebecca, Jack, and I snarfed down yummy food truck mini-tacos, refilled our water bottles, and remounted—our next stop, Indianola. On that leg, as I clicked the + button on my handlebar to assist on climbs, I fretted about my battery’s range (30-75 miles), and clicked off on each decline. I had four out of five bars of power, but Team Card Sharks decided (just to be safe) we’d hunt for an outlet over lunch and charge me up.

My charging station turned out to be The Stitching Place, on the Indianola square, owned by my longtime friend Eileen Leninger. “Sure, bring it in,” she said, and pointed to a sweet spot in her shop where I could hook up. (She also let us use the quilt shop’s bathroom—priceless, compared to a KYBO.)

My friend Eileen Leninger, owner of The Stitching Place in Indianola, Iowa, can make a sewing machine do backflips. Eileen has owned and operated her store, which offers fabric, machines, sewing room furniture, and classes, since 1983.

In the tiny town of Milo (pop. 764), a shot of pickle juice poured over fresh squeezed lemonade, plus the kindness of the compassionate local woman who let me use a secret bathroom, reset my energy, and on we went. In Lacona (pop. 336), hand scooped vanilla ice cream on a fudgy brownie gave me the boost I needed to go on.

After 50+ miles on our bikes, Rebecca and I loved both the park bench in Lacona and the ice cream from a vendor called Our Grandkids’ Ice Cream Stand.

The last leg, from Melcher-Dallas (pop. 1181) to Knoxville (pop. 7451) was 13.2 miles of killer hills. My battery died completely as I topped the last one. For the rest of the way, I had to rely on my own internal juice. It did not fail me.

Rebecca trained in Chicago on the mostly pancake-flat bike trail that runs alongside Lake Michigan, but I’m proud to say that on her single day of RAGBRAI, that girl did not walk a single hill. A staunch eschewer of KYBOS, thanks to all the sweat she sweated, Rebecca’s only actual pit stop was in Indianola at The Stitching Place. Jack, a balanced man, did half the miles with his hands off the handlebars, arms comfortably at his side or stretched out in a T. He’s amazing.

For ten hours, Team Card Sharks participated in a 75-mile parade of cycling types—the incredibly fit U.S. Air Force team (hotties!), the guy with a dog in a backpack, the team that rides in tutus, and the team with plastic corncobs mounted like unicorn horns on their helmets. Along the way, I collected a few choice snippets of conversation.

A woman on a grueling section of hills: “They seem to just materialize, don’t they?”

A man who passed me between Milo and Lacona: “I was lead detective in Homicide for years.”

A tween-age boy to the tween-age boy riding next to him: “So what happens is, his mom gets divorced and starts dating his friend’s dad.”

My husband Mark and our friends Jerry and Randall Parkin drove to Knoxville, waited around way too long for us to arrive, and brought us and our bikes back to Winterset. We showered, enjoyed take-out from China Cafe, and toasted our accomplishment, thankful we would be sleeping that night not in a tent, but in comfy beds, and that we wouldn’t be biking to Ottumwa (62 miles, 2052 feet of elevation) the next day.

RAGBRAI LI was

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