March 6, 2010: Ride Across America 2010:  The Prequel

At our fearless co-leader Jerry Bakke’s request, we’re starting early on this year’s Heartcycle Ride Across America Web reporting. 

So far, emails have been flying around the group about rain gear, travel logistics, and booze -- mostly about booze – but since this is a web letter for families and many of those families include children for which we’d like to imagine we’re providing healthy models, I’ll spare the details of these communications of the group with inimitable booze czar Mark Lestikow and focus on some of the more athletic preparations of the group. 

To flush the winter sludge out of our legs and lungs before pedaling across the southeast, eleven riders plus one of our pimento cheese fixated sag queens joined 20 other Heartcyclists in Tucson, Arizona on Feb 20 for a little spin around southwest Arizona. 

RAA riders and sag queen: (l to r back two rows): Rob Wesson, Norman and Terri Rabinowicz, Rich Crocker, Gary Angerhofer, Mark Berenson, Charlotte Patterson, Julia Brown, Bill Stone, and Chris Matthews; front row: Carol Nies and Jerry Bakke.

The tour was a perfect spring-board to leap from this year’s unrelenting winter cold into cycling season.  We changed old tires, sloshed around in new rain gear, and hopefully shed a few pounds from the mid-line – at least the ones obviously sagging around the horizontal bar of our bicycles. 

This first week of March everyone is back home, hopefully repairing any worn cables, brake pads, or tires; packing gear; and delivering bikes either to Jerry’s house or UPS to ship to our starting point of Kountze, Texas.  On Tuesday March 9, Jerry, Steve Parker, Bill Stone, and Rich Crocker will set off in the cattle cars (I mean Heartcycle rental vans) to drive the bikes and gear to Texas.  The rest of us arrive in Kountze on March 12, tushes tuned, rain gear in tow, and ready to ride.

Jerry models the latest in rain-gear fashion: the shower cap and the “I always wanted to look like a giant grape” rain suit.