RAGBRAI 2008 Day 5

This day's ride was from Tama-Toledo to North Liberty and it took place on July 24. I rode about 75.2 miles at an average of 11.7 mph (6h 25m). This was probably the second toughest riding day for me personally and it was compounded by the "laundry incident" (see below). The day itself was quite cool and there was some rain or light mist for most of the morning. This was the only day I used my rain jacket but it helped significantly in warding off both the cold and the wetness of the day. There was only one really significant picture I want to put out for this entry. It was a home with a great garden surrounding the place (in South Amana, I think). The picture doesn't do true justice to all the "green thumbery" to be viewed, but here it is:


After reaching North Liberty, I stopped in at my friend Barb's house as she had kindly agreed to let me stay overnight there (and, yes, that meant yet another indoor shower *without* any lines to wait in ... sweet!). Well, since she offered to let me use her washer/dryer I took her up on it and promptly threw in riding clothes. However, I had removed my cyclometer (Neuro 4.0) from the bike (which was not necessary, but happened merely out of habit) and then slipped it into one of the riding shirts (instead of one of the storage bags). Yes, I can tell you're ahead of me on this one ... I actually washed and dried the bike computer. And it would not work after that beating. However, it *was* keeping clock time. I tried the reset button but no joy there.

Then I called up to Northtowne Cycling in Cedar Rapids and they had another one in stock. Barb graciously agreed to take me there and I picked it up, thinking the old one was not going to work at all. Then we stopped on the way back and I sang a few songs at karaoke (the Sip 'N Stir bar on 1st Avenue in Cedar Rapids). We arrived back in North Liberty at about 10:25pm and, on Barb's recommendation, I tried resetting the old cyclocomputer again ... and it *did* reset. Amazing! Anyway, I entered the calibration data and got it sync'd to the bike wheel/cadence transmitter and decided that if it worked all the way to the end I'd take the new computer back and just see how long the old (but very clean) one would last.

It worked to the end of the ride and it has now covered over 100 more miles of riding in the past 5 days. So I think Blackburn has a pretty good product (and see my original review in my April 21, 2008 entry) ... it's even "wash and wear" functional (if you want to try this yourself, I used cold water wash and the permanent press drying cycle). By the way, the batteries are still working fine in this unit (something I commented on in the original review) but I only have about 146 hours of operation on them (plus some time at the end of each ride before the computer goes into "Sleep" mode ... I don't know how to come up with that value but it's probably something like 5-10% of the total operating (riding) time ... maybe 7-14 hours here. It seems to me that the unit takes about 10 minutes after every use to actually go to sleep and I don't know of any way to force it to sleep earlier than its automatic "cycle to sleep" time.

Of the people I talked to on today's ride, the most intriguing was probably Yves from Oelwein, IA. She's ridden on 20 consecutive RAGBRAI's (including 2008), starting in 1989. That's pretty impressive.

Well, I got a very good (if somewhat short) night's sleep and had a fine breakfast that Barb made for me before hitting the road at just before 7am for day 6 (more tomorrow).