Day 6: North Liberty to Tipton

Miles: 64
Feet of Climb: [look for edit later]
High Temperature: 82
Sky Conditions: Cloudy and windy all day (headwind again!)

I could not ride this morning. I have no idea what my problem was, but I just could not find my 'wheels'. This is the closest that I've come to sagging in a long, long time. After a horribly slow morning, the bratwurst with sauerkraut at Lisbon managed to pick me up, then a long rest at Mt. Vernon (great town!!) helped to renew my spirit. The afternoon was much better. In fact, I managed to raise my average speed for the day to almost what it had been the other days.

Enough about me though! The group seemed to have a pretty good day. Chad rode in the morning, and Trish and Marilyn drove in the afternoon. We passed through 3 Amana Colonies, where some of our group took in the culture, while others of us kept on cycling.

The weather was dreary, but not too chilly, and not rainy. We did have another cornering headwind most of the day. Upon arrival at Tipton, we settled in to our host house. Our accommodations for the evening were a vacant rental property which we shared with a couple other groups. Lucky for them, and not for us, the solitary window a/c unit was on the first floor, so our digs were very hot and very sticky.

The group split up for dinner. Marilyn and Chad went to 'vendor row' and picked up vittles from vendors they hadn't hit yet, and returned to some of the favorites, since this would be our last night with vendors. The rest of us went to our favorite childhood restaurant, Happy Joe's, and had a wonderful buffet of pizza. Wags mentioned that even the smell as he entered the doorway brought back memories of us 'hanging out' at our local Happy Joe's, many years ago.

After our bellies were full, we again parted ways. Wags and Scott had very good massages, while Trisha accompanied me to a great little coffee house where I proceeded to actually work for a couple hours. In this age of the Internet, it seems one can rarely dodge work for too long, or blogging for that matter!

Wags, Scott and myself then reconnected and went to the beer garden just sure that one of us would win the Miller Lite Party Bus that we registered for earlier in the week. After waiting with great anticipation and having a couple beers the time was at hand to find out which one of us would be driving this great RAGBRAI bus home! Of course, none of us won the thing, some jerk from California did. We all hoped that it would cost him more to drive it home than it was worth!

We returned to our host house empty handed, and dreading a long hot and humid night of barely sleeping, but knowing that the last day's ride would be short and we would on our way home after a great accomplishment!

Kyle.