Spencer Arrival 7\24

We arrived in Spencer around 2:30 after riding 68 miles from Orange City.   Today's ride was a riders dream, flat roads, low heat, low humidity, low winds, no mechanical difficulties, and a few scraped knees.  We witnessed the friendly small Midwestern hospitality of the people of Iowa, they are so friendly and will do anything to help you.   Food, More Food, lots of food..... In other words they kept us full of carbs, anything you wanted was available along the route with a variety of beverages to wet your whistle.  Every town we passed through had their own theme, it was like a country fair event with all kinds of vendors, students earning money for something at school, one Community was collecting donations for a new swimming pool.  We went from one celebration to another as we passed through towns. Vicky approached one little girl who was selling lemonade and she had a huge bucket of money, Vicki asked her what she was going to do with the money and the girl said she was going to buy candy with it. LOL!  One vendor we had an opportunity to try was homemade ice cream,.! They had all the ice cream makers hooked up to "Johnny Popper" motors from antique tractors. They offered four different flavors of homemade ice cream for us to try so we decided we needed to visit them three more times so we could try every flavor.  Lots of photo opportunities of the massive amounts of riders on the road for this thing, it was an emotional experience at the beginning as we started down the route.   We encountered many people along the way, several from Illinois, and had lots of interesting conversations.  We witnessed the caring RAGBRAI community take place as some riders collided, others quickly blocked and redirected oncoming cyclists to avoid more of a mishap to those involved.   Tomorrow we will ride approximately 70 miles with an optional 30 mile loop so cyclists can ride a century (100 miles)