Thanks for chatting with the RAGBRAI staff with regard to the tandem tips. Perhaps this will lead the author to alter a few of the sentences in the handbook for next year.

We will ride in a courteous manner. In fact, we were able to ride about 25 miles yesterday and practice being courteous on a training ride as it was a holiday here in Austria. The bike route was filled with riders going in both directions and we got some valuable practice of riding in a crowd for most of the way. I am getting much more comfortable handling the bike and my 8 year old daughter contributed quite well and didn't complain once on the entire ride about anything. Ten miles of the ride was a climb from the Blue Danube river up into the Vienna Woods on a road with switchbacks and lots of granny gear work. We plan on doing that same ride twice a week this month to prepare for any hill work we will face in Iowa on RAGBRAI.

BB