I'm uploading some video now, and we've devoted today to doing some writing and catching up, so I'm going to gather a good deal of thoughts here and try to relate some of what's been going on with us and the trip.

First, since I really last wrote, it seems like we’ve met more good people and seen great, unexpected treasures than I ever expected. About 10 days ago we really let go of our preconceptions of how this trip was going to play out and started to just take things as they came. It’s still a struggle sometimes to just let life flow, but in general terms we are getting better at it every day. The fact that we keep meeting such incredible people makes it a lot easier.

Telling the story of the last few days is really the best illustration I could make of how well that flow is treating us. When we were in Madison, we got tipped off to TimberGreen in Spring Green, WI. I called Jim BirkMeier from a number I found on their website (www.timbergrowers.com) around 2pm the day we were riding to Spring Green. Having never met us or even heard of us, he and his partner gave us room and board for the night, showed us around their timber operation, and generally gave us complete access to their (wonderful) life. That was a repeat on most levels of the hospitality and access that Mary showed us the day before in Cross Plains.

Jim's operation is worth talking about too. He owns a timber stand of a bit over 300 acres, and he's well-versed in conventional forestry. But he has chosen to take a different approach than simply cutting down the most valuable trees and selling them to a timber company.

Jim has assembled the equipment over time for the full array of operations to take his timber from the forest all the way to the flooring that he will install himself. He watches over his forest, harvests the timber, and brings it carefully from his forest to his woodlot. There he will mill the wood into boards, dry the boards in his custom-made solar kilns, and then edge them in his workshop to be his favored type of tongue-and-groove flooring. From there, the wood waits in his climate-controlled warehouse for a customer to come by his shop and ask for a flooring job. He and his workers install the floors themselves when that time comes.

He's eliminated all the middlemen in his operation, so he captures all the profit at each value-added step of the process. He's also gained an advantage through his comprehensive command of each step in the processing. He willfully harvests trees that aren't prime lumber: crooked trees, short trees, and species of tree that aren't in high demand. Because of his business model and because he can work the unusual boards into his floors, he can still capture a good value out of these trees.

It seems to be a good model, and it is working beautifully for him. It's inspiring to me.

After leaving the Birkmeier’s home, we stayed a night in Spring Green to get some catching up done, with each other and with our work. The former was more productive than the latter, but it was a good day for us. We then rode to Boscobel to stay what turned into 2 nights working on the new website and getting caught up with emails and blogging. It honestly wasn’t all that productive except for the new website, which we’re happy with at least. We’ll see if it turns out to be a good use of our time.

At that point, we also made a transition in terms of our thoughts about the trip. Riding through hilly Wisconsin was slow going, and we realized that there was no way we can keep our proposed pace of 60+ miles biking per day, plus doing video, plus blogging, plus editing, etc. Something was going to have to give. We did some real soul-searching for what we wanted most out of this trip. We want to make this trip to California by bike. It’s certainly an attention-getter and opens doors for us, and it’s a great backbone for the project.

But ultimately biking isn’t the most important part of this trip. We’re making this trip to energize people about the possibilities in sustainability. We’re making this trip to learn about what’s going on in along our route and bring those lessons and inspirations back to Bloomington. We’re making this trip because helping people wake up to the challenges we face and our wonderful opportunities to overcome them is the most important thing we can do with our abilities.

So we decided to refocus on empowering and educating people with our trip. The website redesign was part of that. Our willingness to take it slow and cover the stories we need to cover is part of that. Finally, we’re going to compromise making the whole trip by bike. We need to finish the trip in San Francisco by August 16^th for a variety of reasons, and the only way we could make it by bike now is if we headed straight there and skipped out on doing video, blogging or interviews for most of the trip. Since the material about sustainability is more important to us than biking per se, we’re compromising on the biking. I’m not yet sure what form our travels will take, and we’re going to keep pedaling for at least another week, but I suspect that sometime after Minneapolis, we’ll take another form of transport to do some catching up.

At this point, my best guess is that we’ll hitch a ride with my Dad, who planned to come and meet up with us in South Dakota. He wants to be a part of the journey (and I want him to be part of it too), and he wants to visit some sites that were part of the Louis and Clark voyage of discovery. Clark is an ancestor of ours, and my Dad’s become something of an expert on their voyage. I hope that we get the chance to talk to him about their trip and ours, among other things.

In any case, after Boscobel, we rode to Prairie Du Chien. Through these parts of Wisconsin, we were struggling with rolling hills and making much slower progress than we expected. Unfortunately, with our big trailers we lose most of the momentum from the downhills within the lower regions of any sizeable hill. Most hills turn into slogs uphill in our lowest gear, spinning as fast as we can manage, to only eke out 5-6mph.

The fact that we have been fighting the wind since we left Madison hasn’t helped anything either. Most of the time when you are climbing, one of the better feelings comes when you come close to cresting and you can start shifting up into higher gears as the grade becomes more manageable. It’s an odd feeling when you are riding into these strong headwinds, because you are usually shielded from the wind as you ascend, so you are only fighting the grade for most of the climb. As the grade starts to even out, you start to shift up so that you can go a little faster, but almost as soon as you do, you climb right into the teeth of the wind. Just when you think you can speed back up again and get into a better rhythm, you get pounded back into your low gear.

I’m not complaining. It’s what we signed up for and, to some extent, what we expected. The riding is the greatest physical challenge I’ve faced in my life, and we’re both holding up very well. But we’re also going much slower than we thought and not really feeling like we’re making physical progress the way we expected. I’ve still got a little beer belly, and neither of us climbs effortlessly. If anything, we were much faster while we were in Indiana and had fresh legs.

Back to the story though, in Prairie Du Chien, we stopped at a café with wi-fi and I noticed a bike shop next door through a door in the partition wall. One thing led to another, and before we knew it we stayed the night in a tent in the store owner’s back yard.

Marty and Lisa were great hosts, and we were again accepted with open arms into the lives of people who had never met or heard of us. I played with their dog, Chaco. We went out for the night to listen to the folk music jam at the bike shop (the Prairie Peddler), while children played and people chatted about sustainability and biking. It was a wonderful experience.

Marty was once the city planner in Prairie, but as he tells it he became frustrated with their small-town government that wasn’t interested in building a more sustainable community. So he left his job and opened the bike shop. But it isn’t just a bike shop. He sells art in the store, and tries to promote family activities (biking is one of them). As he describes it, he’s trying to influence people in a different way now, trying to affect change through his business instead of through the government. His story and his actions are inspiring.

We moved on to Postville next. On the way was some of the worst riding conditions we’d seen yet. Wisconsin has rolling hills, but they have wonderful roads with wide shoulders and consistently good pavement. Iowa immediately showed us that it was not so friendly to bikers. Narrow shoulders that dropped quickly to gravel are the norm here, and in the few places where they once had wide enough paved shoulders, they have now gouged out rumble strips that make biking on them impossible. Almost as soon as we crossed the mississippi, we faced the longest hill we had seen yet, an absolute monster that finally pushed us beyond our abilities. Before this stretch, we hadn’t been forced to dismount and push on foot up a hill on the whole trip (this isn’t counting floods or terrible gravel patches that forced us off the bikes). But this hill was too much.

We got off and pushed to the top, but after that exertion early in the day, we never made good time again. We had intended to push for Decorah, but we stopped in Postville to camp for the night. I think Melissa is writing more about Postville now, but it was an odd town. It’s the home of a huge meat processing plan owned by a Hasidic Jewish family, and formerly the illegal employer of hundreds of illegal immigrants from Mexico and Guatamala. There was a recent immigration raid where over 400 people were detained, arrested or deported, and now the town is in a bit of a state of shock. Riding through town, it was striking to see all of the latino businesses downtown, then see the Hasidic Jews walking and driving around in the next neighborhood, then to come to the baseball diamond and fairgrounds, that seemed to be filled only with the German-immigrant caucasians. The town seemed segregated in a literal sense, and I didn’t see any overlap between the groups.

The campground was adjacent to the fairgrounds, and we set up to stay the night. There was a 4-county fair going on the next day, so throughout the evening there was a constant buzz of activity and animal noises. It was pleasant to be around, and the campground itself was peaceful and mostly vacant.

We woke up and toured the fair, even staying to watch some of the dairy show. It was interesting to me that I cared to watch what was essentially a standard 4-H competition in Iowa, when I’ve never really paid any attention to the ones that go on in my hometown. This trip is funny that way.

We rode the rest of the day to Decorah, again struggling with the hilly, windy conditions. When we first descended into Decorah, I wasn’t too impressed. The first sight as we entered town was a super Wal-Mart. As we kept going into town, the big box trend continued, but as we turned and went through downtown, my perception changed completely.

Downtown Decorah is a charming mix of local stores and eateries with all kinds of Norwegian flavor (read: Viking). It has a great, energetic and friendly vibe, and we were energized just by being in it. We rode through Water Street and found Decorah Bikes around the bend, next to a little ice cream shop.

We got some ice cream and then went over to the bike shop to find out where our planned stop at Seed Savers was, and where we might camp for the night. We got those directions, but we also ended up meeting Brad Crawford, a worker at the shop who has a homemade electric bicycle. We agreed that we’d try to meet up with him the next day to see the bike, and took off for the campground. On the way to the campground we had to stop at the entrance to a bike/ped path that had been closed off.

When we stopped, Melissa struck up a conversation with a man who was getting back into his car with his dog. They had been down by the nearby river hunting for fossils. It turned out that this man, John Snyder, was in tune with what was going on with sustainability in town. He pointed us to Liz Rog from the local Co-op food store as someone who was a great resource in town. He even went so far as to call her and ask her if she’d meet with us. She said she’d call me back and seemed very positive about the meet up.

After talking a bit more, we thanked John and headed down the closed trail. The guys at the bike shop assured us it was safe, but that there’d been some damage from the flood and we’d need to be careful. We found a campsite in the nearby campground, and Liz called shortly thereafter. She invited us to a party we were too tired to attend, but we decided we’d meet up the next day after she got out of church. More about that in the next post.