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| The T.I.v11 site header. I designed this one as well. |
With a renewed vigor and excitement for another Trans Iowa I dove in head first and started route designing for the all-new course. I wanted to take Trans Iowa into a completely new area this time and the obvious direction to go was East. We'd been over into the Marengo/Williamsburg/Washington Iowa area once for T.I.v5, but it had been a long enough time that going that direction again would seem pretty new. There are, however; several barriers to getting East from Grinnell.
A cursory look at an Iowa map will show you several reasons why this route direction from Grinnell is hard to do. Rivers, major highways, and major population centers make doing a remote, gravel only route very difficult. To make one worthy of a Trans Iowa? Next to impossible. Perhaps my 'standards' were set too high? Perhaps, but I also had been in this area on gravel before- both on my own rides and in events- so I feel as though I had a handle on what the area had to offer.
While there was much intriguing terrain, it was broken up into areas inaccessible without use of major highways, county blacktops, or it was cut off by what I liked to call 'mismatched road crossings'. This is when you have a paved road cutting across your route, and the main direction of gravel roads, being at a 90° angle to this paved road, have an offset crossing of the paved road, forcing a short distance on said paved road to 'connect' the gravel route. This most often occurred at major highway crossings, which was not an option for me. Obviously, limited access highways such as I-380 and I-80 presented their own obstacles to passage on gravel.
This forced me to look Southeastward more, and as I did, I found a way to make things work. Keeping in mind that I had to utilize convenience stores as resupply points at intervals that made sense, this wasn't easy. Southern Iowa is not as well populated, nor does it have larger towns, as the rest of the State seems to have. This eliminated even more choices. But, even so, I was excited to find some promising routes on paper, at least. All we had to do was verify them and off we would go. Simple, right?
Well, a recurring theme with me is "maps are not 100% reliable". GPS data for rural Iowa is a complete joke, so we won't even get into that, and the only way that you can verify a route exists on gravel is to actually go drive/ride it yourself. So, Jeremy Fry, now my right-hand man for Trans Iowa recon and cue sheet productions, rode along with me one fine Fall day in 2014 and we headed off to Southeast Iowa with a route in hand. It didn't take long to find out the maps were incorrect.....again. This ended up becoming the theme for this particular recon trip.
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| We decided to leave that right where we found it! |
That is until we were about 3/4's of a mile in and found that an old bridge had been removed so long ago that trees about two to three stories high had been growing up through the old barriers put up to block off the roadway. It was plain to see that this road had been truncated for years. maybe decades. Yet the very latest State DOT maps showed this road as going through. See what I mean about maps now?
Jeremy and I decided that if nothing else, this was a prime chance to relieve ourselves of our morning coffee intake which we had picked up at an excellent breakfast joint in Grinnell earlier. As we did 'our business', we noted a lap top computer sitting on the guard rail, as if someone had just been there, only it had obviously been shot through with bullets from a hand gun.
Weird!
We didn't want to know any more about that! So we hastened our way out of that area and as we put that weird sight behind us, we forged ahead on the proposed route South and East.
Next: Fruitless Searching- Part 2
2 comments:
Coincidence, or obscure-ish reference, to a lyric in the Peter Gabriel song "In Your Eyes"? Will there be resolution to all of it in part 2? Great series, to think of all of the stories you have inspired with your races and fruits. Very cool.
@Travel Gravel - Interesting.... I do use musical references in my titles and in the writing from time to time, but this is one time I hadn't thought of doing that, at least consciously. Ironically "In Your Eyes" is one of my favorite songs and I also love the movie it was featured in starring John Cusack, which in itself is rare, since I don't do movies much.
But to answer your question- No, the 'resolution' won't be coming in Part 2. In fact, it doesn't happen in the telling of T.I.v11 stories at all, really. Not until much later. I'll say that much for now....
Also, thank you very much for the comments about the series. I'd like to think that the efforts of the volunteers and myself resulted in some inspiration for those who participated, and furthered their experiences in other areas as well.
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