The Telephone Poles, Trees, and Wires Fly On By.

 On Sunday I woke-up with a migraine that was bad enough that I needed to take meds. IT was the first time in 4 weeks and 1 day. I used to have to take meds for my migraines, once or twice a week, then it was twice a month or so. I'm hoping to get to a point where it's only once or twice a year. Wish me luck!

I went back to bed after taking my meds and when I woke-up again, I was still moving pretty slowly. I got some porch time with tea, my book and a fat, orange cat. The cure for anything that ails me.

Later in the afternoon, we met our friend, Burne at Millstream Brewery in the Amanas. We had heard about a new gravel time trial out there and we thought we'd check out the course.

I knew it was going to be a good day when Burne pointed out the kittens the minute we got there. They were so, so sweet.

It had poured down rain the night before (probably the reason for my migraine), so we figured the roads would be messy, but it was worth a try.

You can't really tell by this photo, but the mud was so thick, it made my fork look like it had an afro. The wheels wouldn't even move.

We spent some time picking mud off and rolling our bikes through that mud puddle to the right of the boys in the photo above. We couldn't keep going on the road, because of the mud, so we turned back around and rerode the first half of the course, back to Millstream. I couldn't get clipped in for the first part back, but I kept kicking my shoes against my bike to get rid of the mud and finally clipped in.

As we were riding, John looked at me and I was grinning like an idiot. "Have fun playing in the mud, did you?" He asked. Yes, I did.

 When we got back to Millstream, the place was packed and there were all kinds of people drinking, relaxing and listening to the polka band playing. It was a fun way to end our ride. Of course, when I was standing in line to buy a beer, a guy we know from racing cyclocross was standing behind me and started picking the dried mud off of my neck. Oops! Can't take me anywhere...

Take a Minute to Concentrate and She Opens Up Her Eyes.

 Okay. Now that I've finally finished the RAGBRAI post and I am finally done with all of the vacation entries, it's time to catch you all up from the last couple of weeks.

I think I mentioned that we didn't ride the last day of RAGBRAI. Instead a few of us rode to Kalona Brewery and back. It's 50 miles of paved and dirt roads in the middle of Amish/Mennonite country.

The Amish boys who are photobombing in the background were intrigued by our funny outifts.

We had a nice ride in, but on the way back, it started to pour down rain and we were on a dirt road. We looked over and saw an Amish or Mennonite run store. We decided to pull over and seek shelter and wait out the storm. While we were standing under the eaves, I noticed a "puppies for sale" sign. It was like Kizmet! I ran into the store and asked the girl where the puppies were. She said they were in a house up the street. My friend Tim asked her if she at least had a picture of them. I've been teasing him ever since. Amish don't believe in cameras. I keep telling him he should have asked her if she could pull up her Facebook page on her smart phone and show us. Ha ha ha ha.

Two other of the Amish boys had to go out and show us that the rain wouldn't melt us and made a big point to push their cart out and get some real work done. Okay. We were shamed and the storm was passing anyway, so we headed back home. I know I say this almost every post, but I love bike adventures.

The Sunday after RAGBRAI, Coadster and my grand puppy came to visit. Coadster is moving back in with us this week to start her job, so she stopped by to hang out with us for a few days and start moving her things in upstairs.

Archie and Bailey are getting along a lot better. Archie gets scared when Bailey stands over him, hopping on one foot to the other because she is so excited to play with him, so he has learned to elevate himself somewhere safe, so he can observe the dog thing for squirrely behavior. Maybe Archie isn't so dumb after all...

My garden is winding down now. Sigh. I am still planning on making as much pesto as I can before the basil starts getting frost bit in the next month or two.

I took the first week after our vacation off from doing much of anything. John's sister was in town visiting, so that made it easy, but mostly I was fried. During our trip we had ridden, run, hiked, and rock climbed 433 miles in 41.17 hours.

Last week, I felt much better and ended up riding 5 of my 6 bikes. I rode my Cannondale Lefty Flash 29'er on the MTB trails once, I rode my Cervelo P1 time trial bike once, I rode my Guerciotti cyclocross bike on gravel once, my Cannondale Caad 10 twice, and my steel frame Handsome Devil bike 5 times for commuting. It was a good week.

This World is Not My Home, I'm Just a Passin' Through.

Thanks for the photo, Lucie Heck.

So, RAGBRAI was only two days for us and I'll cover both of them in this post.

The place we stayed in Cedar Falls was lovely. The family who lived there was so nice and accommodating and we really appreciated their hospitality. On Thursday we had a 71.9 mile ride ahead of us. My legs weren't super strong after everything we did on our trip to South Dakota, but I was excited to get some riding in...However slow it would be.

We got very lucky with the weather. I have had  heat stroke on RAGBRAI before, but it was nice and mild, in the 80's both days.

It was kind of weird to only ride the two days. I've ridden the whole week for the last 4 years. Sometimes it was kind of nice to only do two days. When I wasn't able to shower the 1st or 2nd night, I knew I'd be home the third night and was sure to get one then.

The towns we ride through are so great. They set-up these fun bikes sculptures and have cool activities and bands and free bacon give aways for us.

My favorite part of RAGBRAI, besides the the beautiful Iowa countryside? Having days and days of highways almost clear of traffic to ride my bike.

I know it sounds weird, but many of our members wear gnome hats on RAGBRAI. They take-off their helmets when we stop and put on the hats. It makes it much easier to find people when we enter a town.

Photo courtesy of D. Gibson.

Our stay in Hiawatha was kind of weird. The people who housed us weren't all that nice or accommodating. They were old coworkers of one of our teammates, but they must not have seen each other in a while. His wife didn't want us to use their bathroom, which, since we were out in the country meant we had to go outside. They finally relented for a few hours in the evening, but they were pretty snotty and rude to us. The pretty much made us feel like we were grubby little street urchins, trespassing and squatting on their property. We even heard them talking about us behind our backs. It was so odd. Most people who let us stay in their yard are so wonderful and lovely. I guess we've been so lucky in the past. The drag is, if they had told us that they didn't want us there, I had an offer from another couple who were so excited to let us stay with them and we would have let that couple stay with us in Iowa City the next night. Oh, well.

The other odd thing, is that the people who housed us, had another group of their close friends staying with them, and those friends had a couple of dangerously drunk 20 something's with them. John and I had put up our tent as far away from the where the group was sitting, so they wouldn't keep us up so late. Unfortunately, that just happened to be next to a trampoline. While we were sleeping, the drunk 20 year olds decided it would be a great idea to jump on the trampoline. They were wrong. One of them landed on our tent and woke us both up. We jumped  up and yelled at them to knock it off. Luckily, they stopped before they killed themselves.

As what can happen sometimes, the next day was amazing and fun in comparison to the bad blood from the night before. There was a threat of thunderstorms that was supposed to lessen the further South we went. We tried to head as far South as we could and made it to Mount Vernon before the rain hit. We holed up in a bar - all 25 of us and had a huge dance party/sing along when "Come On Irene" played on the jukebox. Team work!

Photos from Adam Harris.

Sutliff Bridge wasn't actually on the route, but it was right off of it, so we stopped and had a huge dance-off on the picnic tables on the bridge with another team. We were declared the winner, but because we all had so much fun, we all felt like winners.

We had our big Last Supper at Frida Kahlo's in Solon. There was still one last day of RAGBRAI, but we don't always do it, because it isn't very well supported, and this year especially, we were already home and we opted to do a ride to Kalona instead. It was a great couple of days.

All Your Life You Were Only Waiting for This Moment to Arrive.

 On Wednesday we headed back to Iowa to meet RAGBRAI in Cedar Falls, but not before we had one last fling with South Dakota.

John found another great swimming hole called, Hippie Hole, outside of Keystone, South Dakota.

There were two ways to get there. The first was a quick half mile hike and the other was a longer, tougher climb and descent. We had wanted to do the shorter route, because we had to still drive 10 1/2 miles that day. John put it into Google Maps and they directed us to the longer, treacherous route. I was happy with it, because I love to climb, it just meant that we wouldn't get to Cedar Falls until later and have to set up our tent in the dark.

 I'm sure I would have been braver about getting into the ice cold water had we been there in the afternoon when the air was warmer, but this is what we had.

This is a series of me spazzing and trying to immerse myself in water.

 I got about knee deep...

 ...Until I finally wussed-out and gave up.

 This is a series of John not spazzing-out and trying to enter the same icy water.

He's already farther in than I got here.

Yea! He took the plunge and swam out to a cool rock in the middle of the swimming hole. I really wanted to swim out to that rock, but I couldn't take the cold. Wuss!

We headed back, but since there was no real trail, we weren't quite sure how to get back up and out to the parking lot.

Not a bad place to be lost though...

After finding this arrow painted in the rock, we figured we were headed in the right direction...

We headed to Iowa and met our group at about 9:45. I was exhausted, but it was nice to see all of the lovable freaks we ride bikes with. Even if I was WAY too sober to relate to them...

A Family of Trees Wanting to be Haunted.

 Remember when I talked about how hard it was to find the entrances to certain trails? Here's a perfect example. This is the entrance to 11th Hour Gulch.

And here is what it looks like after you go through the trees. You'd never know how amazing it was once you hiked further in.

 Tuesday was our last full day in the Black Hills. We woke up to a little rain and decided to hike in the morning and hope that it would stop raining by the afternoon, so we could ride mountain bikes.

 We headed back to Spearfish Canyon Road and went searching for 11th Hour Gulch. It was supposed to be a bit of a treacherous hike with beautiful waterfalls and rock formations.

It definitely delivered. Of course, it's probably not for you if you have any fear of heights or walking on slippery rocks.

They even installed makeshift ladders to make the climbing easier. They were actually sturdier than they look here.

There was quite a bit of climbing and it was sprinkling on and off, but other than that, the weather held-off.

All of that moisture created cool moss walls that were really cool to touch.

We reached the top and this is what we got. Pretty incredible, huh?

We climbed back down and checked out a restaurant down the road to see what their lunch was like. We heard there was a great view from their outdoor seating area. I looked at the menu and saw that they were selling a grilled cheese sandwich and fries for over 10 dollars. View schmoo. We decided to go for a trail run to Iron Creek Lake and find a different place to eat instead.

the trail was gorgeous.

 We ran out about a mile to a mile and a half and were met by a barbed wire fence. We were told we should be able to get to the lake in 3 miles, but like John said, he takes a barbed wire fence as a pretty good sign that we aren't welcome.

On the way back, we ran into a couple who told us that they heard we should have just gone over it to get to the lake. By that point, we were starving, so we didn't turn back around and try again.

Instead we went back into Spearfish and ate a Mexican restaurant where we got huge plates of food for less than $10. After that, we went to the cottage and took a nap and then went back to Tinton Trail for one last mountain bike ride. I was exhausted, my legs were fried, but I still had a blast riding on the trails.

Since it was our last night in town we decided to go out for dinner and beer. There was a place called Killian's within walking distance. It was a bicycle bar and there were cool old bikes all over the restaurant. The food was great and our bartender was really cool. She was from Illinois and had done RAGBRAI the year before but was going to have to miss it this year. She told us to have fun, we told her we definitely would. We walked back to our cottage and took in the air and pet a stray cat on our final night in town. Sigh.

If You Were a River in the Mountains Tall. The Rumble of your Water Would be my Call.

 Sorry I've been absent. We've had guests visiting. Now that I'm back, I'll continue with the vacation posts. Don't worry. We're getting close to the end of these...

On Monday, John and I decided to ride part of the Centennial Trail. 108 miles of single track. Some of it is unrideable, so we did some research to find a good section on the Northern end of it. There is a part called Bulldog Climb outside of Sturgis that was supposed to be fun to ride.

Check out this sweet, orange, gravel.

We found one of the trail heads and took it up, up, up and we had to push our bikes, it was so steep. After trying a little farther and not seeing an end to the steep climbing, we turned around and looked for the other trail head that would take us in the other direction.

This time we just had to go through a cow pasture and a tunnel under the highway, where we met some lovely bats and rode through water in the dark and hoped there was nothing too scary underneath the water.

Our bikes were very happy on the trails.

We finally got to the actual trail and it was really wonderful. It was another of those gradual ascents on the way out and gradual descents on the way back.

I climbed as far as I could, until my already fried legs couldn't take anymore and then we headed back downhill...Which is always the funnest part...Even with the scary drop-off.

 We went out for lunch, changed our clothes and our bikes and did a road ride down Spearfish Canyon Road and back.

Our bikes enjoyed the view as well.

 It was a beautiful ride - about 45 miles round trip. We stopped at Bridal Veil Falls to take pictures and had a great time checking out the scenery and the cars were very respectful of us. It's nice riding on these scenic highways, very few of the cars are in a hurry and they're all checking out the views too.

 We got to Cheyenne Crossing, which is the halfway point. We stopped and had a Payday candy bar and a beer - a winning combination. Quite a few people approached us to talk to us about our bikes and our ride. It is a great way to meet people.

 On the way back, we took a detour to check out the Roughlock Falls. Since I was wearing a Bike Iowa jersey, a guy passed me and asked me why I wasn't on RAGBRAI. I told him we were meeting them on Wednesday.

We finished our route by taking the bike trail into Spearfish and got to ride through the community campground and the fish hatchery. We did laundry that night and I made some steelhead trout with baked potatoes and roasted asparagus for dinner. Oh, happy day.