Ten-Year-Old Will Dawley Rode RAGBRAI with His Dad and 14-Year-Old Sister and Met John Karras and His Wife!

Ten-year-old Will Dawley rode RAGBRAI with his Dad and his 14-year-old sister and scored an interview with John Karras, one of the co-founders of RAGBRAI, and Mrs. Karras. He said that although they're now in their eighties, they both looked fit and healthy. I heard through another source that Donald Kaul, the other co-founder (both former columnists for the Des Moines Register, the sponsor of RAGBRAI, then and now, the oldest bike tour in the world).

John Karras autographed Will's cap on the inside. He showed it to me. We had a nice conversation with Will and his Mom at the Super-8 in Fairfield over breakfast. She drives the sag vehicle and doesn't ride. I told her she has such a good strength-to-weight ratio, she should definitely consider riding. She said she definitely wants to, and might try one day next year. She's the only person in her family who doesn't ride. 

The Dawleys are from Marshalltown, and we told them how we still have the white cotton Marshalltown handkerchiefs that Marshalltown handed out at least 20 years ago when our kids were small and we first rode into town. They handed them out to all the RAGBRAI-ers. I told her I wished they'd do that again. We still have them all and they wore like iron. I still have some in the car for each RAGBRAI. Even if we had to pay for them, we'd get them.

Will told us their team is called Team White Bar Tape because his Dad bought a black bicycle with white bar tape on it, but he wanted the white bar tape removed before he'd buy the bike. The bike shop promised to remove the white bar tape and put on some new bar tape of his choice.

Somebody said something about "garbage," referring to the white bar tape, I think. So when it came time to come up with a team name, Will's aunt, Libby Dawley, her boyfriend, Dan Hunt, came up with the idea of naming the team Team White Bar Tape.

For the first team ride the Dawleys handed out different colored bar tape for each rider except for Dan Hunt, who came up with the team name. He got white bar tape with "Founder" on it.