A little slow posting- but off to RAGBRAI soon

A busy summer and life intervened, and I haven't posted in a while, so we'll give this another try. At this point, I'm about to head out to RAGBRAI, the Register Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa. This started back when I lived in Iowa growing up, and has grown and become even more of an event in the intervening years. They take registrations for 10,000 people to ride per day, and most estimates seem to say that at least 17,000 ride per day with the unregistered riders. Each day, the ride is a little more or less than 70 miles. It always starts on the west edge of the state and ends on the east edge, with a tradition of  "dipping your tires" in the two rivers that border the state- the Missouri and the Mississippi. I've been riding my bike from 40 to 130 miles each week, with my current total mileage for the year just a little shy of 1000 miles. Along with a little running and walking, I hope that makes me ready to do this. We'll find out soon. I'm taking tomorrow off to finish up everything I need for the trip, then heading to Dubuque by Friday afternoon. The car stays there, and I have a bus ride Saturday morning, with the bike and luggage, over to Sioux City to start the ride. From there, I'll update this blog as I find the time to do so and send occasional twitter updates from my phone. Hope to manage to visit with my Iowa friends and family, but still don't really have that arranged. Here we go...