7/22/96 (Monday) SIBLEY to ESTHERVILLE - 57 miles

The alarm went off at 5:00 and we were up and ready to roll by 6:00 but I made the mistake of trying to inflate my tires first. The rear one's valve tore away from the tire and flattened in seconds. I took out my spare only to find that its valve was already torn away from the tube! I got a tube from Kath and Steve replaced it in seconds.

Today is a short day they say, although it's only 11 miles shorter than yesterday. We started by biking into town for bagels and coffee on the main strip. It tasted great and we hit the road about 7:00.

Today's route only had one major town on the way - Milford. We stopped a few times for pictures - the highest point in Iowa, the lines of rolling bikes. And we saw some of the "famous" people: Team Bad Boy, loaded to the gills will full bars, BBQ grills, etc; Team Dairy Aires (Wisconsites), and Dave & Chris of the RAGBRAI home page.

Milford was a hoot. You could hear the music and disk jockey from about 2 miles out of town, and as we rolled in we could see a few hundred people engaged in the new dance craze, Macarena, involving slapping various parts of the body. Here's some evidence of RAGBRAI Macarena, complete with Killer Bees: Next was an Animal House type rendition of "Shout!" where everyone was on their backs kicking their feet into the air. At this point we noticed some real characters in the crowd - several men in drag, including a nun in a severely short habit with bike shorts sticking out, a ballerina in turquoise spandex bra and short tights with a pink tutu and white tights, and a very short slip dress on a man with a power bar sticking out from under his bike shorts. It turned out this was Team Dragbrai, and they held a beauty contest with full narration by their "Fashion Coordinator". Despite competition from Mongo, the 6'6" drag queen, and the French Maid ("Who doesn't have _this_ fantasy?"), the ballerina won, and took "her" crown to the tune a striptease. All of this was held on top of a flat bed truck in front of a very midwestern looking house complete with two wooden figures of children fishing from the front porch.

We rolled on and the temperatures were in the mid 70's, mainly because it stayed overcast until just before we headed into Estherville. I had found my sunglasses and we had a good tailwind so it was a very comfortable ride. We ended the trip by riding through a beautiful preservation area, with a heavily wooded route, very curvy and hilly. The last mile was a major curvy downhill right into Esterville. As we entered town, we were greated by a sign that said "Spandex Inspection Station", along with lots of cheering townfolks.

Kath & I decided to share a tent again which was good since it was so windy neither one of us could have done it on our own. And again the showers were warm and the lines were short (I'm beginning to doubt all the warnings I'd been getting). We had lasagna in the high school gym and headed out to the shaded circle of plastic stackable chairs at the campsite for some conversation and log entries.

I'm a little concerned about tomorrow since my knee was twinging quite a bit toward the end. A definite Advil day tomorrow since it's 86 miles.

We slept under a huge crane with a large star suspended from the top - Estherville's logo, and a very bright one. But once again, I slept like a rock.