RRVT News
“Do I ride the Raccoon River Valley Trail a lot?” said Irving Stone, repeating our question. He opened his fanny pack & pulled out 19 annual passes for the RRVT, dating to the trail’s first full year — 1990! His wife Virginia Stone has a dozen of them!
Irving & Virginia Stone and their collection of RRVT annual trail passes.
WAUKEE, Iowa, August 12, 2008 – Certainly two of the most loyal users of the Raccoon River Valley Trail are Irving and Virginia Stone, of Waukee.
The Stones, veterans of the Des Moines Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa (RAGBRAI) and other Midwestern cycle tours, pedaled to the 29th annual Sweet Corn Festival in Adel last weekend. Between devouring ears of corn, we started talking to the Stones about their bike riding.
Do they ride the RRVT frequently?
“Let me show you my RRVT trail passes,” Irving Stone said, as he unzipped his fanny pack tote bag. “I’ve kept all of them!”
He fanned the annual passes out in front of us, all 19 of them, dating back to the trail’s first full year in 1990. The RRVT was opened between Adel and Yale in early October of 1989.
Then his wife Virginia pulled out her RRVT annual passes, displaying at least a dozen of them dating to the mid 1990s.
All who saw the Stones’ passes were amazed.
So, we asked Irving Stone, who is 69, when he started riding a bike, as an adult.
“As an adult?” he said with a grin. “Am I an adult yet?”
He did some thinking, and said “actually I started riding in the later 1960s with the old Des Moines YMCA Bicycle Club,” and he’s been at it ever since.
He graduated from Drake Law School in 1964, and then “went to work temporarily for Peoples Finance Company, and have been there for the past 44 years.”
Virginia Stone, 55, is now a parttime TV weather anchor. In the past she was a commercial corporate aircraft pilot. And she is also the only volunteer female diesel railroad engineer on the Boone & Scenic Valley Railroad.
The Stones previously lived in the western Des Moines suburb of Windsor Heights, but moved on west to Waukee in 1998. Irving estimates he now rides his bicycle “about 1500 miles per year year, and Virginia rides a bit more. During our top years, we rode up to 6000 miles a year.”
And a whole lot of those milies have been covered on the RRVT.
Article Published: 08-12-2008
