2026-07-19 RAGBRAI 2026 day 1 pt 3 - Leaving Soldier (and some drama)

More from Day 1 of RAGBRAI LIII. This video is of us leaving the small town of Soldier. For a small town they had a good set up for the vendors and were (as most are) very welcoming. Good view of the vendors and food trucks. We hit up one of the water stations that was easy to access. My wife would probably tell me to clean my camera lens as I can see a lot of glare at this point. Too late. One of the things I like about RAGBRAI is that the vast majority of interactions are pleasant. But this was one of two occasions this year where there was some drama leaving town. We briefly got started back on the route to cross to a gas station, but some people had left the route to skip the town. "Some" turned out to be a large, fast number of folks who didn't want to slow to allow riders on the official route to turn onto the road as we needed to. I overreacted in calling them idiots after the fact. Sorry. Oh well. Glad there were no accidents. Presented without edits.