BRANtastic voyage

June 10, 2012

Here's the summary:
I had a fun time out on the 32nd annual Bicycle Ride Across Nebraska. Some of it was hard, some of it wasn't. It was windy. I met lots of friendly people. Here is one of them. His name is I can call him Al and he has ridden on all 32 BRANs!

King Albert and his sidekick, Lord Hairy Vetch.

I also met a guy name Scott Norris. He seemed in the mood for a talk as I rolled wearily into the hamlet of Sargent. He rides a mountain bike and is a social studies teacher. He was good-naturedly welcoming riders to Sargent.  He told me about some of his extraordinary students. They won the state football champion last year. Nice bite, Bulldogs! One member of the team was nominated for the State Athlete of the Year, and has been known to pull badgers out of their holes with his hands! Zoiks! Scott seemed like a great guy. He went to Europe and visited many of the locations portrayed in the epic mini-series Band of Brothers.  Here is a link to his blog.

It would be inexcusable not to offer a big thank you to the vigorous, well-organized BRAN staff members who put together this exceptional activity.  I had the chance to converse with Ray and Alice, who had been married on BRAN and who had spent time working in Malawi.  Did you know tha Malawi has a female president?  Phil and Kim operated separate stationary SAG locations, but were always tolerant of my jumbled attempts at intelligible conversing.  Heck, everyone was great!

My old man, my uncle and my second cousin were also on the ride. The family element was great. It made me feel like I belonged out there with people mostly on fastly rode road bikes with hankerings for speed and efficiency. Although I occasionally hankered for these two things too, I mostly wanted to get some sweet photos and eat a lot. Thank you to all the host towns for providing large amounts of quality eats!  Good selections, too.  My dad impressed me with his relentlessly fast pace that quickly (albeit temporarily) crippled me if I attempted to match it. My uncle provided enjoyable conversation on and off the bike, and it was great to spend some quality time with both of them. My cousin fixed countless flats and other bicycles as a member of the Bike Rack's mobile workforce.

Although we BRANers generally strove to maintain a modicrum of magnanimity, the ride was not completely without friction. Here are some examples:

1. A man kindly pointed out that my kilt/skirt was caught in my waistband, but seemed slightly annoyed by the sight of my hairy buttocks.
2. Another man seemed slightly perturbed that I left the bathroom door ajar while I was enjoying the use of the urinal at St. Anselmo's Church. Well, here are two points that you mightn't have considered "Another man": a) I wasn't initially planning on pissing urinating, I was just going to wash my hands, and b) it was a 2-holer, which is slightly holier than many bathrooms, and so I wanted to share the opportunity for relief with other members of the BRAN congregation.
3. Some guy gave me an "on your left" at the crest of a hill and then pulled in front of me and stopped pedaling(!?). Needless to say, I had to return the "on your left" and rode with perturbed energy for a mile or two.

Here're some details about the ride:
6/3, Day 1, Minatare to Oshkosh, 73.6 miles. Lovely scenic riding. Rode past Chimney Rock. Seemed to be mostly downhill with a tailwind. Got pretty warm. Made it in time to Oshkosh in time to don a kilt/skirt and find a cool place for some hammock lounging.

A skirted girl was giggling with her friends and said, "You and me both!" and slapped me a high five. It was Sunday, so you couldn't buy beer or liquor in town, so we took a shuttle bus out to the country club.

We learned that Steve Farris of Mr. Mister owns a home south of town and is an avid hunter. So "Broken Wings" takes on a new meaning.  Duck season!  There was a motorbike rally, too.

6/4, Day 2, Oshkosh to Arthur, 61.6 miles. Rode rolling hills along the north side of Lake McConaughy most of the day into a cross/headwind. Turned north on Highway 61 for some tranquil sandhill riding. The sandhills, if you didn't know, are the largest (inactive) dune field in the Western Hemisphere.  We enjoyed a surprise serenade by the Cowboy Capital Chorus during our dinner at Veterans Memorial Hall in Arthur.Another band, the Carr Family Cowboy Band, played the Arthur High gym later, but I was already comfortably trapped in my hammock.  What I heard from my hammock sounded great.  Everyone I talked to gave them a good review.  It was a nice cool evening, so I climbed the press box tower at the Arthur High football field and attempted a panoramic photo.

6/5, Day 3, Arthur to Stapleton, 65.0 miles. Less hilly. Met a woman at a lunch stop (baked potato bar) in Tryon who told me about how she was the fastest female bicyclist in her former group, and that she almost beat the fastest male, and definitely would have if she hadn't lost it in some gravel on the penultimate turn. Damn.

6/6, Day 4, Stapleton to Sargent, 78.3 miles. Great fast downhill on the turn north between Arnold and Anselmo. I heard speeds ranged from 43 to 51 mph. My personal speed was "Yowza! That's fast!" The stretch between Anselmo and Sargent seemed especially long, flat, and windy. We were now in the Middle Loup River valley, with the sandhills just to the south of the highway. I may have become slightly delirious. I attempted (unsuccessfully) to record onto my camera a beat box riff that was in time with my pedaling. It was on this day that I finally noticed Jeff's bicycle was a singlespeed.

He'd ridden it as a fixed-gear on the first day(!?) before flipping the hub. He also had to wear wrist braces since the bar doesn't really allow for multiple hand positions.

6/7, Day 5, Sargent to St. Paul, 65.4 (68.4?) miles. I was very stiff and sore this morning. Mostly the sides of my knees, some in my lower back. It was pretty hard to bend down, or to walk with normal-length strides. I resolved to ride in as low-impact a manner as possible. Pretty tough riding into a cross/headwind for much of the day. Spent a good deal of it riding with my uncle. Near Scotia, we stopped at the Happy Jack Peak and Chalk Mine, a 6-10 million year old diatomite deposited in a large lake.  Also traded drafting opportunities with a woman on a Trek Portland. Seems like a good idea for a mass-produced bike, but looked maybe a little heavy. The distance between Elba and St. Paul was stated in our guide book as 7.3 miles, however the sign on the road stated "10 miles." This discrepancy resulted in a fair amount of discontented grumbling amongst the odometer-oriented among us. St. Paul was a nice town. Had dinner with Dad at the American Legion. A tasty walleye. Then to the County Cage Bar for a few beers, some NBA and Swamp People on TV and live music! Another cousin, my uncle's daughter, met up with us here and rode the last two days with us.

6/8, Day 6, St. Paul to Shelby, 55.9 miles. Today was a relatively easy, flat ride with a tailwind. I wasn't nearly as sore, following my low-impact day. Took a dip in the Shelby pool. I was informed that this mural

(in the Shelby Senior Center, where I enjoyed a delicious, homemade hot fudge sundae) was painted by the mother of gold medal-winning bobsledder and Shelby's hometown hero, Curtis Tomasevicz. There is even a penny-farthing rider hidden between the cow and the barn in the mural. 

Such an artistic and sporting community you are, Shelby, Nebraska!  I also learned that an allegedly famous artist that I had never heard of, Terence Duren, was from Shelby, and that he had designed his own tombstone.

6/9, Day 7, Shelby to Yutan, 56.4 miles. Some hills and a crosswind provided some resistance to what was otherwise an easy finale day (avec accentes, sil vous plais). Just for the hell of it, I wore my kilt over my bike shorts today, just as I had during the final day of RAGBRAI 2009.

At the Saunders County Museum, the youthful receptionist informed me that the last time she had seen a skirted gent was at a funeral, where he was playing a bagpipe. Also that I "probably had better legs" than him. Saucy. Back at Yutan, a few people took an interest in me due to my kilt (as I have no other notable characteristics). An excitable rider from Lincoln with a stuffed squirrel on his helmet, whom we referred to as "Squirrel," accosted me and said, "You get all the press! Next year I'm getting chaps!" You do that, Squirrel. I may or may not be there, as I have resolved to swap Shifty's slick tyres out for some knobbies (yep, nothing like a bunch of hard knobs to put a smile on everyone's faces) for the rest of the season.

Unpaved surfaces, here we come! With hard knobs!