Fairfield residents invited to celebrate RAGBRAI’s arrival July 26

FAIRFIELD – The Fairfield RAGBRAI Executive Committee is making the final preparations to host 20,000 RAGBRAI riders on the morning and afternoon of Friday, July 26.

Fairfield is a meet-up town on this year’s RAGBRAI route, roughly halfway between the overnight town of Ottumwa where the riders will stay on Thursday, July 25, and their next overnight town of Mt. Pleasant the following day. Though the cyclists will pass through several smaller towns that day such as Agency, Selma, Libertyville, Brighton, Wayland and Trenton, the significance of Fairfield being the meet-up town is that Fairfield is the only place where the riders can access their support vehicles until their overnight stop.

Riders will enter town on Libertyville Road, then go north on Key Boulevard, east on Fillmore Avenue, north on Fourth Street and then ending up on the square where live music and vendors await. Fairfield will host concerts simultaneously at two locations, the AERON Lifestyle Technology Main Stage downtown, and at the Soapbox Speakeasy Stage a block north of there inside Petra Park. Twenty-four vendors in the downtown will have booths to sell food, drinks and other merchandise. When it’s time to leave town, cyclists will head north on B Street, turn east onto Kirkwood Avenue and then head to Brighton on Pleasant Plain Road.

Fairfield RAGBRAI Executive Committee member Mendy McAdams said one of the most important things for the town’s residents to know is that parking will be unavailable in the entire downtown from noon Thursday, July 25 until 5 p.m. Friday, July 26. Vehicles that remain in the downtown in this window will be towed. Parking is also not allowed on the route itself, and vehicular travel on the route is strongly discouraged for the safety of the riders.

“I know that it’s an inconvenience, but it’s literally half a day,” McAdams said about the parking and travel situation. “It’s going to take a long time to set up all there is, with a beverage garden, a main stage, a secondary stage, and RAGBRAI is bringing a semi to sell swag, and a medical bus from RAGBRAI. A lot of what is happening is not dictated by our local committee, but is dictated by RAGBRAI.”

Terry Baker, another member of the Fairfield RAGBRAI Executive Committee, said residents who live along the route should know that, at some times during the day of July 26, the road outside their house will be hard to travel.

The stretch from Ottumwa to Mt. Pleasant is the longest day by mileage on the route at 84.8 miles. Plus, riders can tack on another 16 miles on the Karras “Century” Loop near Wayland to make the day an even 100 miles. Since the day is so long, Fairfield RAGBRAI committee members expect cyclists to leave Ottumwa in the wee hours of the morning, and that Fairfield residents will start seeing riders enter town as early as 6 a.m.

RAGBRAI services to aid cyclists are available between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m., so the organization encourages riders to move from town to town in the morning and afternoon instead of waiting to make their trek in the evening. To help facilitate that, RAGBRAI has an agreement with Fairfield to end its beer garden and live entertainment at 1:30 p.m. that day so the riders know it’s time to move on.

“We’ll see a heavy presence of Iowa State Patrol around 12:30 p.m. who are reminding riders it’s time to get to the next town,” McAdams said.

Baker added that, since Fairfield has usually been an overnight town where the riders stay for hours and hours, this year’s experience of being a meeting town will be markedly different.

“People aren’t coming to linger. They’re going to stay for 45 minutes to an hour,” she said.

McAdams said Fairfield is expecting to host about 3,000 support vehicles at the Jefferson County Fairgrounds, in addition to the 20,000 riders. If the fairgrounds fill up, the committee may direct support vehicles to park on one side of Grimes Avenue.

The state RAGBRAI organization has given Fairfield enough money to rent portable toilets and purchase insurance. Local companies are stepping up to provide services, too, such as LISCO making free wi-fi available. AERON Lifestyle Technology will set up an “oasis” in the Ron Prill Bandstand where guests can be misted with aromatherapy.

Baker said a few of the highlights for this year’s RAGBRAI stop in Fairfield include being able to use all-local bands at both stages from 9:30 a.m. until 1:30 a.m. Plus, some groups are using the huge influx of people as an opportunity to fundraise. One family is trying to find a bone marrow match for a 13-year-old boy with a rare blood disease.

Any profits that Fairfield makes from this RAGBRAI stop will go into what organizers are calling a “flush fund” to remodel the public bathroom a half-block west of Central Park on Burlington Avenue that has been closed for about a decade.

“Public bathrooms are important to a downtown, and ours are in desperate need of an upgrade,” Baker said.

  Buy Photo

Call Andy Hallman at 641-575-0135 or email him at andy.hallman@southeastiowaunion.com

  Buy Photo