Monday, June 18, 2012
How getting called into the editor's office so many years ago for an assignment to cover RAGBRAI helped save my life.
Another bicycling season is upon us. Well-upon us, actually. I was telling somebody the other day how, with the mild winter we had, I was able to ride my bicycle 14 or 15 days in January, and totaled a couple hundred miles. There was only one other year I ever rode that many miles in January, and that was back in 1995 when we were getting ready to do a ride across the U.S. that summer. While thinking about that, I started wondering just how many years I've been riding. I had to count it on my fingers to confirm it, and what ho! This is my 30th year of bicycling as an adult! I was so amazed I asked my wife, Carla Offenburger, to count her years of bicycling, and this is her 27th. It was in my eighth year of riding, Carla's sixth, when we …
Thursday, June 14, 2012
The former Iowa Boy columnist for The Des Moines Register has a way with words – and a heck of a story to tell about cancer, love, cycling and life.
If you want to know Iowa, you want to know Chuck Offenburger – or at least his writing. Many of you already do. Offenburger was the Iowa Boy columnist for The Des Moines Register for decades, and he’s still cranking out the copy from his farmhouse located, as he puts it, “northwest of Jamaica and straight north of Yale“ – which would be just outside Jefferson. On Monday, Patch will run a column by Offenburger that originally appeared in the KMAland Advantage Club Newsletter, which you can subscribe to by clicking here. In the piece, Offenburger talks about being called into his editor’s office long ago and being assigned to cover RAGBRAI. That assignment, as it turned out, led to a love affair with cycling – which helped save his life, and…
Saturday, May 26, 2012
This week, “Iowa Boy” Chuck Offenburger leads our team of experts on the best places to spend the long, hot days ahead.
- THE NEIGHBORHOOD FILES
- Beth Dalbey
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Saturday, May 26, 2012
Never mind that the summer solstice isn’t until June 20 – 6:09 p.m. CDST, to be exact. It has felt like summer for a couple of months now, the final school bell will ring in a few days and Memorial Day, the unofficial start of summer, is just around the corner. How will you fill the long, hot days ahead? What are the best “staycation” bets in Iowa? What's the best-kept secret in your town? Tell us in comments. So with the kids about to be free of school, where should you take them for a day trip? Have you made plans for a vacation in Iowa. If you haven't, pick the brains of our experts. This week, we turn to former Des Moines Register columnist Chuck “Iowa Boy” Offenburger and a team of experts from convention and visitors’ bureaus, nature…
Proud UNI Grad
9:38 am on Wednesday, June 20, 2012
Excellent!! I rode a lot of bike as a kid. Mostly, it was a necessity to get from home to friends' houses. I rode quite a bit in college. Again, a necessity to get from apartment to campus and class to class. A few years ago I re-discovered biking as a means to exercise my aging body without killing my joints. What I discovered for the first time, though, was that it was the all-time best way to … more ›