Guitar Ted Death Ride Invitational 2019 Update

2019 Guitar Ted Death Ride Invitational- July 27th, 2019:

The site has been pretty silent since last year, but you should expect to see some news cropping up over there on the GTDRI blog now that June has kicked in and there is only about six weeks or so until this goes down.

The 14th annual GTDRI will be a bit different and back to an old location for this event, but a familiar one for me. This time the GTDRI is going to start and end in Grinnell, Iowa and the route will be a different animal as well. The last time the ride was in Grinnell it was the 8th annual edition. That ride was over 100 miles and did not take in much for Level B roads.

Well, this version is going topsy-turvy on that mold and you can expect a distance of around 60-70 miles with at least one third of that being dirt roads all in Poweshiek County. That is, if the route I have planned pans out. It may not if it rains, but that will all be part of the adventure. I also may not get all of the route reconned, which I have done in the past- not reconning the entire route- because I like to leave bits of the GTDRI as a surprise for myself, but I also may just look at the whole thing anyway.

The Level B's are steep in Poweshiek County. From the 2012 GTDRI.

Okay- some basic information for the new folks here: The GTDRI is basically an open invite to join me on a no-drop style group ride/adventure for a day. It isn't "exclusive", or even an "invitational" in the truest sense of that word. I just came up with a pompous name for this ride 14 years ago and have stuck with it ever since.

It is cue sheet guided, and since the group sticks together, we all don't even have to have cues. But that said, I will provide the route and maybe even a tcx file for your fancy pants GPS devices. Probably on Plot-a-Route. I'll link to that via the GTDRI site when I get a route nailed down. The day of the event you show up, if you want to. No registration, no fee, no number plates, "no barriers", or whatever. It's the way I've done this since the first one in 2006.

As I said, this one will start in Grinnell, probably in front of Bikes To You on Broad Street to get a little Trans Iowa mojo going. The start is always around 6:00am. The end is always whenever we get back, but hopefully that is in the afternoon Saturday. There may be a bit of hangout time, since the route distance will be shorter than I've ever planned, but that's due to the difficulty of the route and possible re-routing on the fly. The Level B roads will be very steep at times since Poweshiek County is pretty hilly. I expect that winching up and getting down some of these may take a bit of extra time, and depending on the group, we may have to make several regrouping stops as well.

So, I've got to get myself in gear to recon bits of my sketched out route and nail down some details. Give me a shout out if you have any questions about this event or the route ideas. More soon......