Des Moines bicyclist Tim Lane, left, and friend Cal Murdock, pose along the road in Panama during their “coast-to-coast” ride there this month.

Now this is the sort of biking tip that we RAGBRAI sloths can cherish.

So Lane on Sunday biked the 45 or so miles from Colon (on the west) to Panama City (on the east) in six hours — pummeled by heat and burdened by a heavier, 32-pound mountain bike that he rented from the local Bikes and Coffee shop. (Yes, the proprietor had heard of RAGBRAI. Speaking of that, why don’t we see more bike-coffee hybrids in Iowa?)

Lane was joined at the 11th hour by friend Cal Murdock, a familiar figure in the Des Moines running community.

Rather than the typical RAGBRAI scenery of “corn and corn and soybeans,” as Lane put it, the pair of Iowans rolled past banana and coconut trees and bamboo thickets.

They spied “a massive ship being elevated in a lock, into the lake in the middle,” he said.

The ride to Lane seemed “kind of surreal in those situations.”

Lane this year also is coping with prostate cancer that he described as in the “active surveillance” stage. But he would like to return to Panama and make the coast-to-coast trek on a lighter bike in less time.

“I was not in the right shape,” Lane lamented. “I’d like to go back and do it again with my bike, more training. Not at the end of winter.”

One thing that RAGBRAI and Panama do have in common: bananas. The fruit doesn’t grow on trees in Iowa, but it’s a popular roadside snack between gulps of water and Gatorade.