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| Jeff Kerkove's last design for the GTDRI blog header |
The entire deal with "Black Electrical Tape" and the revealing of that bike previous to the third running of the Guitar Ted Death Ride Invitational kind of guaranteed that most everyone that was going to be there for the ride would show up the night before. And I think that influenced what happened that evening. It also set an interesting precedent for a few years.
Including myself, six of us were there. Besides Jason Boucher on his 'secret bike' there was Matt Gersib (MG), Matt Wills, their friend Jeffrey Bonsall, and David Pals. I've mentioned before that there were always people I was surprised at by their attendance to this ride, and a late comer that would often make us late to start. This GTDRI was no exception in that way, other than that I think we actually did get rolling right on time. The surprise riders were Jeffery Bonsall, a Lincoln, Nebraska acquaintance of MG and Matt Wills, and the next morning, it was Michael Beck, who I never would have pegged as one to show up at this ride. Not that he wasn't a cyclist, or a gravel rider. He was. But he resided in Colorado. Only a chance visit to members of his family in Marshalltown, Iowa had brought him there in time to join us.
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| Trouble begins! (L-R) Jason, Matt Wills, David, MG, and Jeffery Bonsall. |
The scheduling of this ride also was different than many GTDRI's in that I moved the date to the weekend of RAGBRAI's start. I did this out of my spite for that ride at the time. See, we gravel riders in Iowa were always accused of "getting ready for RAGBRAI" at that time which kind of got under my skin a bit back then. So, I decided that if my big Summer ride was happening the day before RAGBRAI started, well, that meant we weren't going on RAGBRAI, right? Only it didn't work. People we ran into still thought we were getting ready for RAGBRAI because they didn't know when RAGBRAI occurred exactly. Oh well.......
Anyway, back to this story! The trouble started when we built a fire and all the beer was brought out which people had with them to share. Conversations were had into the wee hours of the evening under a full moon which rode up fat and hazy in the humid night air that July night at Hickory Hills campground. We all were tent camping there, and the plan was to head out the next morning, do the ride, return, and maybe hang out some more.
This was the first GTDRI where a pre-ride social thing happened the day before. There was the year previous, where we all met for breakfast, but this had a different feel to it since we met the night before. While it gave all in attendance time to get to know one another and socialize, drinking copious amounts of beer the night before a century of gravel miles probably wasn't a wise idea.
Scratch that! It definitely was not a good idea!
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| Badly out of focus, but you get the idea! |
Well.....it was a good idea though. I mean, these were times that ended up being pretty precious to me. I usually did not get to spend a lot of time with members of a cycling community that were of like mind to me. People who loved to ride gravel, have an adventure, and people that wanted a challenge. Most of the time I was working on bicycles, or writing about them, and social time was rare for me.
Of course, I cannot speak for those who showed up at this ride, but my feeling is that they were feeling much like myself. We counted these rides and the gatherings they engendered to be special moments in time. People who would not ordinarily have been together, at a ride that was definitely not a race, but a fellowship of gravel cycling junkies.
And it was good. At least that's the feeling I got from this ride, and those that followed. So, while getting drunk the night before a big ride in hot, humid weather seems like a really bad idea on one hand, I don't know that we'd have changed anything about how things went down either.
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| The full moon over Hickory Hills the night before the third GTDRI. |
That said, I do recall having conversations with David Pals afterward that we maybe should dissuade this sort of behavior for any future GTDRI rides. I know we both paid a price the following day! That was nothing to be wondered at either, since we had both consumed more than our fair share of beer that night before.
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| Up and at 'em! Duty calls.... |
The next day came too soon, but I got out of my tent and was rolling since I was the ride leader. Hang over or no, I had to be on point. I got dressed and went down to the main visitor parking to see if anyone had shown up early to join us. I did not see anyone, but just as we were about to head out, as I mentioned above, Michael Beck did arrive and was ready to go in a jiffy.
And we were off on a foggy morning for a century ride which would be mostly in Tama County. A county I would spend a ton of time in upcoming years for reasons I did not quite know about at that time. Back then, Tama County was a big unknown to me. So, as I recall, even seeing some of the roads I already had ridden was still exciting in that "new" way that roads you don't really know yet can be. I was excited to show them off.
It's kind of funny now when I think about that. Tama County is very familiar ground to me now days. There aren't a lot of its roads which I have not either ridden on by bicycle or car. And that familiarity makes it a bit hard today for me to describe my excitement for that GTDRI in 2008. But I was excited, and I was ready to roll despite the previous evening's shenanigans.
Next: The third GTDRI
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