For the first time in decades at least, the full RAGBRAI route was not printed as a single map in The Des Moines Register. This year, the Iowa Life cover on the first Sunday of March was about… prom styles.
Instead, RAGBRAI.com released one map per day for the week and the Register printed that map each day. I am disappointed that a single full route map wasn’t put out, and surprised that the PDFs combined for 20 MB. Those files: Sun, Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, Sat. This drawn-out process is very similar to what happened this year to the OTHER traditional big March reveal, and for much the same reasons.
Looking at my compiled universal map and database of every RAGBRAI route and town visited, here are some notes about this somewhat rare excursion to southern Iowa.
- First visits: Malvern, Imogene (“gravel loop,” only half of which is gravel), Rathbun, West Chester, Columbus Junction, Fredonia, and Letts.
- To give another impression of how “small-time” this route is, there are only seven towns with a population above 1000 that are not overnight locations. There were 20 last year and eight the year before that.
- Creston is hosting overnight for the first time since 1997, and Leon and Centerville the first since 1981 (the former was a pass-through in 2003).
- RAGBRAI goes into Louisa County for the first time since 1979, Ringgold County for the third time ever, and Wayne County for the fourth time ever, but Corydon is still frozen out.
- Diagonal gets its first visit since 1981. The other tiny locations in northern Ringgold County visited then are left out this time. Garden Grove, Humeston, and Mystic had equally long droughts.
- I’m surprised that the route does a 20-mile straight shot between Sigourney and West Chester without hitting Harper and Keota, neither of which have been on the route since 1986.
- Don’t be fooled: Bethesda is a church and a cemetery. That’s 25 miles with no villages between Essex and Villisca. New York is so nonexistent it doesn’t even get a map dot on Mapquest.
- Much of Sunday is on never-traveled roads, and Monday on once-traveled roads. Creston-to-Diagonal was only used in 1981, old IA 66 is new, and then the entire route from Mount Ayr to Ottumwa hops from 2003 to 1981 to 2009.
- Everything from the IA 92/W15 intersection south of Keota to the end of the route is all new, never traveled.