RAGBRAI in Homestead (An Amana Village)

If Billy could ride a bike.....he would do RAGBRAI.....so when RAGBRAI stopped in the Amana Colonies for its second visit, Billy requested that he be front and center.

I store the Hummer in a secret place in the town of Homestead, so early this morning I proceed to the storage garage and it fires to life even though it has not been driven for awhile. You see the Hummer is thirsty and unless Billy needs to go somewhere or there is a lot of snow cover, it just hibernates most of the time. (I actually have been thinking of pawning my blackberry for gas money) I'm off to Middle Amana and the second story walk-up to gather Billy the lung and the backup power supply and before we know it we are back in Homestead to see a good number of this years RAGBRAI participants stream into town.

For the blogies from outside of Iowa who are not familiar with RAGBRAI , please point your browser to here.

There used to be a lot of party people on RAGBRAI ....but nowadays it seems like a bike ride
to the church picnic. Gone are the naked beer slides and people riding au natural....at least thats what I heard. Naked Gun still rides RAGBRAI, having done so for 33 times. Some of those times he was wearing his signature slingshot.


A phone call to him today confirmed what I thought...no more slingshot. Just like everything else, things are never the same as the old days.

However, the beer drinking continues and I shot a few pics to evidence that.

It appears that virgins are a rare commodity as I only spotted one in the whole group.


This whole party for the RAGBRAI people was chaired by Tony of AJ's Copper Garden. He's the one in the muscle shirt.

Anyway, today, Billy lived vicariously through the whole event naked in his iron lung and no one was the wiser.