By incredible coincidence, I found on Flickr some nice photos of my own bike, shot by a stranger in Chariton, IA, day 4 of RAGBRAI 2009.
Here is his photostream, which captures the spirit of RAGBRAI 2009. I tried to embed the photostream, but Wordpress doesn’t seem to like Flickr embedded objects.
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Ragbrai is an annual bicycle tour across Iowa, with thousands of participants. Here is a 5-minute snapshot of what it’s like.
Freeway of bicycles
Bikes out ahead on the road as far as you can see.
Only bikes, no cars.
You can talk with the other “drivers” — little conversations all day long.
Big campsites, small towns
Every day, pitch your [...]
I smiled just now, for no particular reason. Just randomly happy about how things are going. This sentiment, once rare, is suddenly common, and I suspect the change is not circumstances, but simply that I stopped drinking coffee three weeks ago.
The change was for an unrelated reason: I’m starting RAGBRAI on Sunday, and didn’t want [...]
A friend and I will pedal 420 miles across Iowa in July. We’ll be camping, i.e. no electricity, so to record the whole ride on GPS, I wanted a solar panel for my iPhone.
To find exactly the right thing was unexpectedly hard. Most consumers want compactness, so the ready-made solutions are almost all iPhone-sized, with [...]
I’m not dogmatic. Must I personally supply every erg to propel my kayak from point A to point B? No. That would be extreme, and in some cases, unsafe. Plus, I just like the idea of kayak sails like this item from Pacific Action.
Sometime after my shoulder heals, I plan to make the 11-mile crossing [...]
Quality US products, where they do exist, have a smaller carbon footprint than imports.
In the 1990s, Hobie made the Trifoiler, a delicate-looking twin-mast sailing hydrofoil that could make 35 knots. This would take you from Los Angeles to Catalina Island in 40 minutes, if the boat survived the swell.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxRRlrOqqK8&hl=en&fs=1]
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Shane Chen of Washington State designs and sells amazing small vehicles from his own website, including a human-powered hydrofoil.
Pedal-powered hydrofoil and bicycle speed records.
One relatively unexplored direction in human-powered boats is the hydrofoil, in which the hull rides atop aircraft-style wings beneath the water. Above a certain speed, the entire hull is lifted above the water, reducing drag to almost nothing, and permitting very high speed. Foilkayak created the Flyak around this idea.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U95UReP4mdo&hl=en&fs=1]