Memorial Day rides, 2005

Boy, the weather here has been strange! It had really been pretty chilly up til the last couple of weeks; we had a late-season frost/freeze in mid-May and because it had been damp and cold prior to that, I am way behind on my garden for the year. Trying to balance gardening with riding the bike… neither one getting much attention! It has finally warmed up in the past couple weeks; we went on a large-group memorial ride on May 21; about 400 bikes took a short jaunt across town to the memorial gardens at our state capitol. Very nice event, perfect weather, no bad luck to report (yay – I’m keeping the shiny side up!)… Very much like the Toy Run last fall, and a nice memorial program. One of the “visiting dignitaries” was the guy who paints an annual memorial mural on a large rock situated on one of our Iowa highways, Ray “Bubba” Sorensen. I work for our Chamber of Commerce so I’d actually researched this a little before, but heard lots of comments from the bikers that somehow they thought Ray was an older guy – he’s actually a young adult just out of college. Here’s his website and a preview of the rock: http://bubbazartwork.com/.  

Took another nice ride on Memorial Day itself – the DH, DD and I set out with no particular destination in mind except “lunch,” and we ended up in the town of Boone about 50 miles from here. Took a scenic way up, had lunch there, and took a scenic route home through a lovely state park called The Ledges. Whoever said Iowa is flat hasn’t seen this place.