RAGBRAI

Check out this video. It give a good snapshot of what RAGBRAI is like. Iowa is great and the people who do RAGBRAI are super friendly.

Yes, that was Lance in the video. The last guy is the iconic Mr. Pork Chop.

Hillsboro

Last spring I raced the Hillsboro Roubaix in Hillboro, Illinois. This picture shows us pulling out to start the race. We all waited for a while before it started so when this picture was taken everyone was cold. I raced in the cat 4 group. The pace was okay at first, especially when we headed into the wind. Later, it was really hard to pass and get set up for the hills, so when they came I got yo-yo'd off the back.

I found a few guys to work with, so we kept it up. About 5 miles into the second lap I flatted and remembered that I didn't have any CO2 cartridge to inflate my tube. Mike S gave a cartridge, but it didn't fit my adapter and I only got about 30 pounds of pressure into the tire. I just rode on the mushy tire anyway. I could go fast on the staight parts, but the turns messed me up bad. The tire would have rolled off the rim. I kept passing one of women racers, then she would go by me when I slowed down to turn. I kept asking the course marshalls if they had a pump. It would have been surprising if they had one, so no luck there. Finally Bill M from ICCC caught up to me in a support truck and we got my tire pumped up. I rode on and finished just passing the woman racer I had been doing the cat and mouse with earlier.

Hillsboro is always a hard race. I can't wait for next year.

A Night in the Studio

Our band decided we needed a decent demo tape. Instead of recording it ourselves we decided to pay a studio to record us. We wound up using Smith Lee Productions in Maplewood. We came up with a song list and made a simple versions of the songs for practicing. The big night came on a Monday.

It was pretty cool getting all set up and doing the headphones thing. Our recording engineer was pretty young, but seemed to know what he was doing. Once we got going we managed to record everything live in the studio without any overdubs. We normally have backup vocals, but we ran out of tracks. Here is a medley of what we recorded. It is a pretty big MP3 files so it might take a while to start playing. You could also try the right-click, save as... to get it done faster. We did three songs that I wrote -- Daddys Cookin, Persistent Memories, and So Long, See You Later.

The recording was quick and dirty, but I like it. If we could take our time we could really make a good blues record.