Join me for a mellow bike ride through Mennonite country for a good cause. We'll spot some of the fruits of progressivism along the way, and you may end up penciling in the Courage Ride on your calendar for August 2014.
Courage Ride logo
The Courage Ride honors a young man who died of cancer and raises money for cancer research. Tell me honestly, can you resist this?
Honoring the Courage of Seth Bailey
JOIN US! Pedal over gently rolling green hills leading past Amish homesteads and over old stagecoach routes!
ENJOY! Fabulous foods all day from start to finish; a mouth-watering Belgian Waffle Breakfast, a substantial biker's lunch, and plentiful snacks at rest stops that will keep your legs fueled and moving!
RELAX! The hills will be alive with the sound of music! Live entertainment throughout the day - even at the rest stops!
SILENT AUCTION! Place a winning bid on bikes and other fantastic items in our silent auction!
AMENITIES! Detailed route map, SAG support, bike mechanics, hot shower, free grass camping, and a really cool Courage Ride slap koozie.
DONATE! Your entry fee goes to a great cause! This annual bike-ride through the beautiful countryside of Eastern Iowa is dedicated to improving the lives of people living with cancer by raising money funding local cancer research at Holden Comprehensive Cancer Center at The University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics. Your donation can help find a cure for sarcoma and other cancers!
NON-RIDERS WELCOME! Bring your family and friends. Dad's Belgian Waffle tickets may be purchased on the day of our ride at Iowa Mennonite School. Lunch and snacks are available for purchase as well. Stay with us and enjoy the music all day long!
BIC logo
The ride organization is ably supported by the enthusiastic and experienced Bicyclists of Iowa City (BIC) who also organize a group of 170 or so for
RAGBRAI every year. If you have ever been tempted to try RAGBRAI but don't think you want to have 19,000 people around or can't spare a week, the Courage Ride is a wonderful alternative. One day long, it offers rides of many lengths, from
16 miles to 97 miles. You can even mimic the RAGBRAI experience by camping out either Friday or Saturday night.
In several respects though the Courage Ride is even better than RAGBRAI. All the different length rides begin and end at the Iowa Mennonite School, so it accommodates riders of all levels of ability. The weather at the end of August is almost uniformly gorgeous, and cooler than RAGBRAI. The landscape is as beautiful as any that RAGBRAI passes through. And the rest stops! Oh, the rest stops!
Setting out
Here Tall Papa and I get ready to set out. His bike is a 1974 Peugeot - his handlebar bag is a handmade Frostline of the same vintage. Mine is a Trek road bike, a present for my sixtieth birthday. I used to say about my old hybrid (that carried me for five days of RAGBRAI!) that I loved it because when I got on I felt twelve again. When I get on this green beauty, I feel eighteen - and French. Our long sleeve microfiber shirts are SPF 50. They act like swamp coolers, flicking off sweat and evaporating it to keep us cool. (don't worry - he put on his helmet after the picture was taken.)
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We did the 25 mile route, so this rest stop was our only one. No bike stands of course so we used this old trick for standing our bikes - a good metaphor for shared action.
Informal music from local musicians
Local musicians at every rest stop and lunch place provided music throughout the day - so much more relaxing than boom boxes set to 11. They would play requests if they knew the song.
Shady rest
As a rest stop, this site was flawless. Lots and lots of shade, ample and comfortable chairs (you can't quite see the BIC marks on their backs - these chairs have seen all of Iowa), and situated on a hill top (the grass is banked - Tall Papa shows the vertical) so there was a gentle breeze while we were there. And discreetly off in the back, a functional clean privy.
Peaches! And cheese curds! And Gatorade!
This is what Tall Papa raved about last year. "Sweetie, the rest stop had peaches!
Peaches!"
Indeed they did, and they had peaches again this year - very good, juicy ones. Tall Papa had brought along his Swiss Army knife this time, happily. But in addition to the peaches they had the old faithful, bananas, as well as apples, peanut-butter filled pretzel bits, three flavors of cookies, and cheese curds made at the cheese factory we had just passed. For drinks there was ice water and two flavors of Gatorade to make whatever flavor suited you. The water was unlimited and you were welcome to fill up water bottles too.
Since we were doing the 25 mile route food wasn't so big an issue (especially since we had had Belgian waffles just before starting at IMS). But the food was unlimited and they urged folks to carry some away with them - very welcome for folks on the longer legs (though there were rest stops further along as well). We ate the pretzel bits two-thirds of the way back.
This rest stop suits families very well. The shortest route is just out to it and back to IMS, so several families had loaded small ones into bike trailers, made their leisurely way out to this stop, and let the children roam around and play on the grass. After an hour or so they headed back for an easy lunch at IMS - a lovely family morning.
Sharon Center cemetery
In case you hadn't made it out in the picture of the musicians, yes, this rest stop is next to the Sharon Center cemetery. It happens to be the one where Seth, the young man honored by the ride, is buried. These small country cemeteries are dotted all over Iowa, a gentle reminder of transience and family. Perhaps the most touching ones for me are the family plots, often enclosed with a white wooden fence or iron railings a small way off from a farmstead with a few grave stones of various ages.
Welcome relief
Iowa is dotted in the summer with large outdoor public events. Large numbers of people need sanitation. But these portable privies don't travel all that well, so there are small local companies all over the state to meet that need. I don't think I've seen the same company's name more than a few times. This company's slogan made me laugh. It was spiffy to use, too.
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Farmstead and orchard
At the far left you see Tall Papa and an road empty to the horizon. We saw perhaps twenty cars on our route which made for very pleasant biking. True, it was a Saturday, but these roads are generally nearly free of traffic. They are the legacy of the
Farm-to-Market movement in Iowa, begun in 1925 (or a quarter century before Texas). The state recognized that farmers needed a way to get their produce to markets and made provision for funding the web of roads. A secondary benefit is that it made it easier to get rural kids to school. These rural roads help make biking in Iowa a pleasure.
This farmstead was like many we passed - a comfortable, well maintained farm house, a large kitchen garden and a small family orchard. The apple trees serve many of the purposes that sent Johnny Appleseed on his travels two centuries ago - fresh and dried fruit, cider, hard cider and sweetness from boiling the cider down. The flowers in the spring are just bonus. Because of the farm-to-market roads most of the farmstead lie along the roads lending variety to the views.
Cornfield and vista
The route lies mostly along a ridge, and vistas fall away to one or both sides. This is one attempt to capture those vistas, but none of the pictures do them justice. While we did see the canonical Iowa landscapes (corn both sides, beans both sides, corn left and beans right, beans left and corn right) those were a minority. Most of the time it was like biking through a Grant Wood painting. The winding path through the corn field is called a "grass gully" by folks colluquially - its proper name is a grass hedge and their use for erosion control was developed at Iowa State and other land grant universities. Since Iowa is
not flat, almost every corn field here has one or more of them.
Farmstead and vista
You may be wondering about all the small farms. Where, you may be asking, are the huge, "efficient" corporate farms? Well, in Iowa we don't have them. Corporations cannot run a farm. They can, and do, run farm equipment businesses but farm ownership is limited to people - flesh-and-blood people.
Family ownership of a farm is not always simple, of course. The actual
law is detailed and a bit beyond me but I love the repeated use of "natural person," meaning a flesh-and-blood people-type person that you can shake hands with.
Other states also have bans, of variable force.
Here's a summary of the Iowa law:
Iowa
Iowa’s anti-corporate farming statute is located at Iowa Code Ann. ¤172C.5A (West 1990). Iowa recently amended its anti-corporate farming statute to ban output contract farming. Iowa Code Ann. ¤9H.4 (West 1995). The law prohibits corporations, limited liability companies, and trusts - other than family farm corporations, authorized farm corporations, family farm limited liability companies, authorized limited liability companies, family trusts, authorized trusts, revocable trusts, or testamentary trusts - from acquiring an interest in any agricultural land in the state.
The major organizational exemptions require (1) that the shareholders be related, (2) that the stockholders all be natural persons, and (3) that sixty percent of the gross revenues of the corporation over a prior three year period have been derived from farming.
Other exemptions include (1) land owned by nonprofit corporations, (2) land owned by municipal corporations, and (3) agricultural land held for research or experimental purposes. Enforcement of the Statute may be carried out by the Attorney General or the County Attorney. Penalties may be assessed up to $25,000 and the corporation forced to divest the farmland within a period of one year. Enforcement is assisted by the lengthy requirements imposed on the submission of reports which must be sent annually to the Secretary of State by contract feeders and by any corporations owning farmland in the State.
Iowa law also makes it unlawful for beef and pork processing corporations to own, control, or operate a feedlot. This section of the law proclaims that “[i]n order to preserve free and private enterprise, prevent monopoly, and protect consumers” there shall be a separation of ownership and processing corporations. See Iowa Code Ann. ¤9H.2. Violations of this portion of the statute may be assessed a penalty of up to $25,000. The Attorney General or a County Attorney may bring suits on behalf of the State to enforce the provisions of the Act.
Flowers in front of the kitchen garden
Every farmstead had a large kitchen garden, and every kitchen garden was banked with flowers. This farm was particularly exuberant!
I would have loved to include pictures of the Amish and Mennonite farmers, farm wives and children. Lots of folks waved to us as we passed, and a merry birthday party on one farm was especially enticing. But many of these folks don't believe in having their pictures taken and we didn't want to put them on the spot by asking.
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ICN network at Iowa Mennonite School
Seth Baily was a student at the
Iowa Mennonite School near
Kalona. A glimpse at the
agricultural coursesthey offer quickly shows why most Iowa farmers have bachelors degrees or more. Many IMS graduates go on to one of the professions as well. This small sign is one example of fruitful public-private partnerships. The ICN (
Iowa Communications Network) links schools, health providers and governmental offices.
The Iowa Communications Network (ICN) is the country's premier distance learning and state government network, committed to providing Iowans with convenient, equal access to education, government and healthcare. The ICN makes it possible for Iowans, physically separated by location, to interact in an efficient, creative, and cost-effective manner. ICN provides high-speed Internet, data, video conferencing, and voice (phone) services to authorized users, under Code of Iowa, which includes: K-12 schools, higher education, hospitals, state and federal government, National Guard armories, and libraries.
Because IMS offered to serve as an ICN node, they get the benefit of the educational offerings that come over the ICN, such as AP courses. In return they make the node available to any qualified user.
Another public-private partnership that helps the IMS is that their students are allowed to use the public school buses. This makes sense: their parents are paying real estate taxes, and letting IMS students use the buses adds no significant burden if any since the area is low density and few of the buses travel completely full anyway.
IMS sculpture gallery
This is a small student sculpture gallery - I could have done an entire diary on the student art on display.
Ice cream wrapper
When we got back we were ready for lunch. We had a choice of hamburgers, grilled chicken breasts or veggie burgers, all grilled right there just a few minutes earlier. A pasta-veggie salad, a variety of chips and unlimited cookies made sure that no one went away hungry. This ice cream bar was another of Tall Papa's memories from last year. The wrapping is charming, but somehow I doubt they are using Grandma's recipe.
So what do you say, folks? Shall we gather a covey of Kogs for next year's ride? It is great fun in its own right. It would also be good as the beginning of a week of biking in Iowa, a 25 mile ride to get the week started easily, or as the finale, capping off days on our beautiful rails-to-trails conversion with an exquisitely run 97 mile ride. And think of all the good we could do!