Community Notes: RAGBRAI Committee looking for housing help

By Ryan Venz, Executive Co-Chair, Charles City RAGBRAI Committee

Viva! Charles City! The excitement is building for Thursday, July 28, when our community will host RAGBRAI again.

In 90 days, our town’s population will grow by approximately 20,000 overnight, and we are excited to highlight our beautiful community to thousands of cycling enthusiasts and their accompanying entourage for a few days. How great to have an opportunity like this?

Brady Garden and I are executive co-chairs overseeing housing, campgrounds, showers/sanitation and recycling.

As this extensive process unfolds, a key date is upon us that we would like to share. On May 1, registered RAGBRAI riders obtained their registration number and began finding housing within our community.

With the ever-changing world of technology, we are embracing a new process of recruiting hosts and housing bicyclists for RAGBRAI. This year we will be utilizing Facebook to facilitate the process.

If you have not done so already, we encourage you to please go to Facebook and like, “Charles City RAGBRAI.”

Once you have found our page, navigate to the Groups tab, and click on “Charles City RAGBRAI Housing.”

Now that May 1 has rolled by, we are beginning to see posts from community members looking to host cyclists or cyclists looking for hosts.

Once the connection has been made these individuals (host and bicyclists) will communicate on their own and share the accommodations they have or need and pertinent details that each will want to know.

Hosts are an extremely important part of our housing options we can offer. What hosts provide, experience has shown they receive back tenfold in friendship, company and stories from guests all over the world.

As a host, it is great to be able to provide parking for motorhomes, space for tents as well as inside floor space.

Hosts are not required to feed or transport the riders. It would be great to have access to a bathroom and/or shower as well, but that is not a requirement.

Riders are expected to start arriving early morning on Thursday, July 28, and will be leaving around 9 a.m. on Friday, July 29th, (if not earlier).

We are following the rules of housing for RAGBRAI very closely, and we want to ensure all riders requesting housing provide a wristband number as proof of their RAGBRAI registration.

Housing unregistered riders opens the host to full liability for whatever happens at their home.

We could not pull off RAGBRAI without all the volunteers and appreciate your willingness to represent our community during this time.

If you have any questions or concerns on housing, please contact the Charles City Chamber of Commerce at 641-228-4234 or visit us on the Charles City RAGBRAI Facebook page.

Alternately, we are available to chat via email at cc.ragbrai22@gmail.com.