Bizarre

this time last year on Tabor

I ride off today, under-dressed, in my RAGBRAI jersey and Pearl Izumi bike shorts. It's the only pair of shorts I have and my only real jerseys are my RAGBRAI jerseys, so there it is, my uniform. My emotions are a mixture of anger, sadness, frustration, and delight. Life is like that sometimes. I'm not going to go into the first three other than to say that by the end of this ride they were just memory, a happily forgotten result of climbing hills. The delight was because I had made the most delicious homemade tomato soup for lunch and while I was enjoying it my dad called. I hadn't talked with him in a while and it was nice to catch up.

I was moving quickly in the beginning and drivers were pissing me off. One ran me into a parked car after a stoplight and another passed me while I was going around a circle. It was a perfectly ridiculous thing to do on such a quiet street so I guess I wasn't all that surprised when the passenger leaned out of the window, just a foot away from me and takes my picture. What did surprise me was that he was wearing a Jason hockey mask. How bizarre! I've seen this guy before when I did my Bicycling Daydreams ride.

As I pulled into the park, I saw him jump out of the car, run up to these two women and take their picture. "What are you doing?," one of them says, while the other has the presence of mind to pull out her smart phone and snap a picture of him. He poses for it, then jumps back in the car and they speed off.

I pass a road biker, dressed much more appropriately in pants and a jacket and say, "Howdy." I'm freezing at this point and glad I turned on the sauna before I left home. I pedal on to the top, circle it, and scream down in front of the reservoir at 27 mph. Just before I reach the bottom I see the two women and stop to talk about how strange the hockey mask guy was. We decide he was looking for pictures of shock when I tell them about my experience. I think my mouth was open and my brow was furrowed in my picture. Concerned, maybe. Confused, for sure.

Then as I'm riding away, one of them yells out, "Hey, RAGBRAI!" We get to talking and we graduated from the University of Iowa a year apart. "I've always wanted to do RAGBRAI!" she says. Small world.

This is just a short little Tabor ride, but already it has been filled with fear, surprise, mystery and fellowship. It is just what I needed to remember to shake off things that make me feel sad or hurt. And, when in doubt, even if it is for just an hour, go for a bike ride!