Another post as an aside, not necessarily related to the core mission of our trip.

The news in the United States is atrocious, as is our public discourse generally. Not atrocious in terms of what's going on, although with wildfires, floods and a collapsing economy it can be that too. Atrocious in terms of how things are covered, the depth that is offered, and the effective relating of how people are going to be affected by what's going on in the world.

There are so many legitimate problems going on right now, short and long term, that it seems stunning to me that the main headlines about the upcoming presidential race center on whether Obama is now wearing his flag lapel pin more often, or whether he rebuffs Wes Clark's comments, which are being portrayed as questioning McCain's patriotism.

Honestly, who cares about these manufactured controversies. It is not a requirement to be a President to wear flag lapel pins. Wes Clark saying that McCain being a POW doesn't give him foreign policy experience is not Clark impugning McCains patriotism.

The media creates these stupid controversies to keep up ratings in a news environment that produces cheap, easy stories with lots of emotion.

There are real problems of a short term nature going on right now:
-Wildfires in California
-Floods in the midwest
-Droughts in the south
-Economic depression setting in
-Increases in food and gas prices
-The bombing housing market
-Iraq and Afghanistan not substantially moving towards better governance and peace

There are other problems of massive long term impact:
-Global Warming
-Peak Oil
-How we move away from a credit dependent economy as a country
-How we disentangle ourselves from our disasters in the middle east
-How we reclaim our government from the grasp of moneyed special interests
-How we recreate a media system that informs and appraises people about how their lives are being affected by what's going on in the world, our country, and our region (hint: Obama wearing a pin or not does not affect you at all)

To his credit, in the latter article, McCain's reply to Clark's statement was, in part:

"I think that that kind of thing is unnecessary, I am proud of my record of service and I have plenty of friends and leaders who will attest to that. But the important thing is if that’s the kind of campaign that Sen. Obama surrogates and supporters want to engage, I understand, but it does not reduce the price of gas by one penny …doesn’t help Americans stay in their homes … it certainly doesn’t do anything to address the challenges that Americans have in keeping their jobs, and their homes and supporting their families."

I think he's unfair to pin blame solely on Obama surrogates, given that McCain surrogates serve up the same kind of crap on a regular basis. But he's right that none of this matters one bit when it comes to solving the substantial problems that face the country.

This morning I read the letters to the editor in the local paper, the Owatonna People's Press. Two of them were honestly shocking to me, one about how Safe Sex education is killing people, the other insinuating that Obama is The Great Deceiver, or at least a terrorist supporter.

It is hard for me to comprehend how people become so misguided. Bad stewardship of information from the media is one reason. Intolerant religiosity is another. But uncritical acceptance of authoritative information seems the biggest culprit. A bit of thought about either of these letters would seem sufficient to disregard their main thrusts.

If Obama had relationships (funding or otherwise) with terrorists, the government would have been all over him by now. Honestly, do you think for a second that the opposition party that controls the intelligence and prosecutory power in our government would not have absolutely destroyed the most promising politician to rise against them in the last 15 years? Bush/Cheney's administration would have Obama strung up by now if there was anything at all to these allegations, leaving aside the whole argument of him being The Great Deceiver.

Premarital sex destroying lives is another canard that really needs to die off. Not only is it a relic of a repressive ancient patriarchy, but it is part of a larger regime of sexual repression within our society.

Sex can be great. A lot of that has to do with communication and education. Understanding sexuality and the particular needs of your partner are keys to fulfilling sexuality, and trying to destroy safe sex education programs. My darkly favorite passage of the safe sex letter is this one:

"[those who have premarital sex will have] a heart filled with suffering, pain, guilt and dear and a life that is dry, barren, darkened, fruitless and hopeless wilderness that extends throughout all eternity."

I'm not burdened with guilt for the sex I've had in my life. I'm glad Melissa and I have the sexual experiences we have. I'm going to marry the woman who I love and who I have (and will have) a wonderful sex life with. I'm confident that we're going to have a great life together, sexually and otherwise. We are going to travel through life together with hope and light in our lives, and we'll keep learning about sex and sexuality as we go forward.

All of this fear mongering about premarital sex is overblown and crazed to me. You can have sex and not destroy your life. Every day we keep going is a living example of that.

Today, Andy and I rode around 35miles up to Owatonna, passing somewhat flat terrain, with the occasional rolling hill. On a flat surface with our 90pound trailers we can get up to 15-18miles an hour. To our dismay our speed was more like 8-9miles, as the wind was constantly pushing at the front of us. Good for wind turbines, bad for bikers, so like usual, it took us longer then we expected. However, there was a bit of a reprieve when we would come up to a row of trees, as it blocked the air flow and we were able to pick up some speed. Unfortunately and to my tired legs, this rarely occurred as the miles and miles of corn more so dotted the landscape.

If the trees blocked that much wind for me, I wonder why this area and others like it don't plant more of these natural barriers to block the wind for the crops, especially with soil erosion being so high in the US.

As I just looked up some facts on soil erosion(love wifi), I've found from a Cornell Study by Susan Lang, March 2006, http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/March06/soil.erosion.threat.ssl.html:

• "The United States is losing soil 10 times faster -- and China and India are losing soil 30 to 40 times faster -- than the natural replenishment rate.
• The economic impact of soil erosion in the United States costs the nation about $37.6 billion each year in productivity losses. Damage from soil erosion worldwide is estimated to be $400 billion per year.
• As a result of erosion over the past 40 years, 30 percent of the world's arable land has become unproductive.
• About 60 percent of soil that is washed away ends up in rivers, streams and lakes, making waterways more prone to flooding and to contamination from soil's fertilizers and pesticides.
• Soil erosion also reduces the ability of soil to store water and support plant growth, thereby reducing its ability to support biodiversity.
• Erosion promotes critical losses of water, nutrients, soil organic matter and soil biota, harming forests, rangeland and natural ecosystems.
• Erosion increases the amount of dust carried by wind, which not only acts as an abrasive and air pollutant but also carries about 20 human infectious disease organisms, including anthrax and tuberculosis."

Good to know, so what do we do about soil erosion? I'm on a mission to find out on the trip, so stay tuned.:)

Also, here's the latest installment of pictures from the last couple of days.
http://www.changinggearsmovie.com/resources/photos/062708M/index.html

I remember my family’s first out state trip to CA when I was in second grade, and vividly I remember when the van drove through the desert passing hundreds of wind turbines that were foreign and surreal at the time, as I later found out was the San Gorgonio Pass Wind Farm. Coming from Michigan I had never seen so many windmills, and later after living there I just figured California seemed like an anomaly compared to the rest of the states, but this past week I have a renewed faith in our Midwest region and am excited that the possibilities now exist as we are investing in renewable energies.
My hope occurred after passing through the wind farms near the edge of the border of Iowa and Minnesota. Though I didn’t think I would be enthralled by these structures, I was like a curious child speechless, in awe of these massive white anomalies. “How were they constructed? How did they get there?... this is amazing,” as I thought to myself continuing to stare at them. Erect at over 300ft, with blades probably over 200ft in length, I stopped on the side of the road, still sweaty from biking; for a brief moment, I realized and felt that we are indeed in a new era. Though news would seem to tell me otherwise, as coal plants are continually being approved for construction, such as the recently approved $2billion coal plant on the west of Indiana.

I am a bit disillusioned as I’m not going to claim that I know what Indiana is doing, that’s why I am on this trip, but the little bit I know continues to support a system that still isn’t healthy to the people who breathe in the matter, this includes other parts of the region as well. So I was pleasantly surprised about the Midwest proliferation of wind turbines going up since we started the trip. Along our route when we would tell people of our quest for sustainable practices, in the most random places, the feedback we received has been surprising, as we have now heard of the wind farms north of Illinois, south west WI, MN, and even plans for the west of the home state, Indiana.

Over the next couple of years the southern state of Minnesota will have hundreds of wind turbines generating electricity for hundreds of thousands of people, and as I read more about wind energy in general, though we currently use only 1% of our power through wind, the number could be over 20%! Now if we could also diversify our input from solar, geothermal, biomass, we could get off of our use of nuclear, and wean ourselves away from coal and gas.

Ironically, a French company owns it, and the parts are probably from a different country as we have been behind in green manufacturing, but nonetheless, it is a sign that we could be weaning off or at least replacing where we get energy, as coal continues to emit particulate matter and nuclear energy waste is undetermined. Yeah wind!

Resources to check out:
I found this very helpful in understanding the basics of wind energy:
http://www.awea.org/
A good resource for policy and law in the Midwest region concerning environmental issues:
http://www.elpc.org
Here’s the info on my childhood surreal experience in one of the california wind farms:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tehachapi_Pass_Wind_Farm

Holy cow! So this morning I get up and we're on the front page of Treehugger. They are one of my favorite sites for enviro-news, so this is a great thrill, even if now we've got even more to live up to. :)

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/06/sustainability-america-documentary.php

Hitting the road again this morning after a couple of days editing, doing back-end work on the website and getting the two of us reconnected again. We're hoping to make Minneapolis in 3 days or so, and we should make good progress today being so fresh.

Welcome Treehuggers! Enjoy our trip. :)

We're holed up in a new hotel, as we are trying to get caught up with some editing and blogging. Unfortunately, the editing is taking the lion's share of my time and I'm not feeling too productive. But the hotel room is nice for a change, and we have free coffee and a bit of food on the way.

I wish we had time to go see Wall-E, but we must make movie magic ourselves. Ciao.

Good evening! So Andy and I are in Austin, MN and will be heading north tomorrow. Today, we've mostly updated our blogs and website. So definitely take a look at the Video and Sound page and check out our Short Videos, as you'll see wind turbines, blood thirsty mosquitoes, sweat, seeds, the search for a good breakfast....it's all there.:)
Night! M

Yesterday, after having another late start from Decorah, we climb the huge hill that parallels highway 52 with very little power, as both of us were feeling unmotivated. Once at the top we turned left onto highway, and within a couple of miles saw the sign we were looking for"SEED SAVERS", with an arrow pointing left. This was one stop that I was giddy for, as I was introduced to Seed Savers by my good friend Deana, who orders her heirloom seed every year from them. She also gave me the book "Seeds of Change", that discussed the importance of seed, biodiversity, and sustainable issues that gave me some sort of sense of duty in understanding more about this precious little thing, the seed, as honestly folks I really needed the 101 biology course.

The book also did a great job at stirring my sense of conviction, as I learned that during the 1920's the brilliant scientist, Nikolai I. Vavilov, toured the world to collect, preserve, learn about varieties of seed, and genetic diversity. He traveled and procured tens of thousands of different specimens and found that where climate conditions were unstable, the soil was richer when the crops with genetic diversity flourished, and polyculture farming reduced insects and vunerability to disease. At the same time, where he was estabilishing the seed bank and researching more, Wallace from the US was pushing for another research and promotion of monocultures and the American hybrid, which had higher yield, but farmers had to buy seed year after year. Unfortuatnely in the 1930s as the russian revolution was occuring, Vavilov life was cut short, according to some reports, as he was sent to the labor camp and ironically starved to death. Obviously, the American hybrid was favored over saving seed and giving biodiversity the advantage, as we see how the landscape has changed over the past 50years.

I have to admit, I never thought about saving seed or the importance of it, until that book, as well as with Vandana Shiva’s books about genetics and intellectual property rights. This may seem pedestrian to some, but even when I write this now it feels like an ephipheny that our food stuff comes from this tiny little entity, it grows to produce something that continues to sustain us, and I for one didn't much think about the unappreciated seed.

Because we drove our markets to monoculture farming, increased pesticides/herbicides use, continue to modify corn and soy gene and put it in most conventional food stuff, we unfortunately have also lost biodiversity, our connections to our past as the seeds our greatgrandparents brought over when they emigrated have been plowed over along with the knowledge of stewardship and balance, we've increased cancer rates, and the seeds that used to sustain us, the varieties, are going extinct. Geez, I say! I want my perfect summer strawberry back, or the complex taste of the tomato, rather the the waterlogged perfect red fruit, I want the knowledge of knowing more of the land, soil, and seasons, what plants can coexist together, etc, to support a system where farmers are getting paid for the value rather then the commodity.

Fortunately, one organization is doing something to give me back a wide variety of tastes and heritage, most that I never knew existed. http://www.seedsavers.org/aboutus.asp . Since the 1970s, what started off as a couple of plants that were given to Diane Ott Whealy from her termilly ill-grandfather, who had received the seeds from his parents of Bavaria, Seed Saver Exchange has grown to over having 27,000 different varieties where they save, plant, sell, research, and educate the importance of seed saving. They have over 800 acres in Decorah, Iowa, where over 1 million species have passed the hands of gardeners, concerned, and excited citizens.

To say the least I was excited when I saw the sign, and even more so, when I actually saw all the different seed packets to choose from. Andy and I both tired of biking, renewed our life of life and each other as we talked excitely about gardening, variaties, food, community. We'll have to wait till next year to plant, but will work on figuring out our garden in the meantime. Plant a seed for me:)

So here's the latest installment of pictures. There were some rather lovely flowers at the farm. :)

http://www.changinggearsmovie.com/resources/photos/062508m/index.html

I have tens a welts on my body…trying not to itch like a madwoman, but it’s hard. I can even hear the little buggers outside our thin nylon sheet. I despise them. I even kill them, when for others I’d cup in my hand and set free. For those I feel it’s my karmic duty, or something, but not with mosquitoes. Oh no, the one small thing taken out of the food chain would be these guys. I don’t know if that’s sustainable or not, but right now, after briefly, I mean briefly, being outside I believe I have over forty bites on me. And unfortunately, as soon as those discerning thirsty annoyances suck me, I welt up and actually am in pain. So here I sit, unable to scratch, because that also makes it worse, looking like I have the hives, and am utterly unsettled.

According to our friendly camp hosts, and others we have passed along the way, the mosquitoes this far south of Minnesota is a rarity, very strange indeed. They say it’s because of all the rain, and there are now stagnant waters everywhere, even the potholes have been breeding grounds. If this is indeed the case, I really hope that the reporters are right about this being the 500 year rain. Sounds ambitious since climate change is occurring, but next year I’ll be happy with one less insect.

I had to get that last post out, but this one is really about catching up the blog a bit. We're going to try to get things up to date and get some full interviews online while we are here in Austin, MN. It's a decent town and we've got wifi access downtown at the coffee shop (till 5pm) and in the hotel.
To start, I uploaded this gallery a few days ago but then we lost wifi access and I couldn't post about it or put it in the archive:

http://www.changinggearsmovie.com/resources/photos/062508/index.html

More in a bit.

Edit: Adding another gallery to the first. This one is pretty small, but it shows the worst bathroom and worst french toast we've had yet.

http://www.changinggearsmovie.com/resources/photos/062708/index.html

Last night we went out to find a coffee shop with wifi, to no avail. The two coffee shops in town close at 3pm and 5pm respectively. It is absolutely amazing to me how early things across the midwest shut down, even in a decent-sized city like Austin. Austin has nearly 25,000 people. Do none of them drink coffee after 5pm? If Starbucks or Caribou is listening: this town is ripe for the picking.

After we ate a simple meal at one of the local bars (nearly the only thing that seemed open at 8pm), we rode back to the hotel. I intended to blog, but we got into a longer conversation with each other that lasted nearly till 10:30. It was good to just relax and talk for a while.

Then I got on the computer and Melissa turned on the TV. As she flipped through the channels, I noticed John Yoo was on C-Span, and blurted out "that's the torture memo guy." It turns out that he and David Addington, Cheney's former counsel and now Chief of Staff were appearing before a House Subcommittee (I believe the Constitution Subcommittee). We watched for about an hour and a half as Yoo dodged and parsed questions, and lamely asserted that he'd been instructed by the Justice Department (where he formerly held a post under AG Ashcroft) not to answer this or that question. Addington was much more smooth, confident in his demeanor. Perhaps he feels he has less at risk here.

Whatever the case is, it seems obvious that these men (among others) are responsible at least in part for creating a policy that allowed torture, and likely still allows it, to occur in the name of the United States. It is incredibly frustrating that they can sit in front of the Congress and merely say that they "don't remember" seeing torture, or that they cannot answer a question that would divulge classified information.

My apologies for those who might be put at risk by the divulging of classified information, perhaps even including my fiancee who is across the table writing, my family and my friends, but if someone is being tortured in my name, I want to know about it. Classified information be damned. We elect officials to run this country on our behalf. If we elect a president who allows heinous crimes against humanity in our name, we all bear responsibility for it, and the notion that any such activities would be hidden from public view by the facade of it being sensitive information is insulting.

Tell us what's being done in our service. If we like that, we can keep voting for it. If we don't, we won't. If we can't survive in this world with a transparent system of governmental operation, maybe we need to rethink how we are being governed.

I'm not saying that we should open up the government intelligence archives, or out all of our covert agents or something. I'm saying that someone like John Woo should be able to tell us whether we are torturing people and how, if he has that knowledge. I'm saying that what my country is doing is my business. I pay taxes. I vote. I am a citizen of the United States. The actions of my government are, by extension, my actions. Tell me what I'm responsible for.

We're alive. Just got to Austin, MN where we're staying at the Day's Inn and getting caught up on email, blogging, etc. after 5 days of camping and 2 days without internet or phone reception.

Oh, and I had prunes for the first time in years, and my stomach is going crazy. Will write more later. :)

-Andy

I had just eaten handfuls of ripe, delicious strawberries, compliments of David and Perry-o's farm, when we had to finally be on our way after a day of exploring our new friends off the grid dwellings.As we begin to leave, Liz, the creative woman who is the purveyor of magic and curiosity with her many songs and ideas, gathers our new friends in a circle and tells Andy and I to embrace each other. As our eyes are closed the six of them form an outer circle and begin move around us. Having only spent the last eight hours with Liz, it is clear that a song will be song, and sure enough as they clasp their hands and move, my ears pick up the harmonies of lyrics that they all seem to know. As they give us good tidings and wish the wind to our backs , a natural warm feeling occurs within me. At the same time, I sense Andy moving closer to kiss the top of my nose. My eyes start to get wet, and a wave of love for Andy and the people we just met settle in naturally. As the song starts to die down, there is a stillness and a sense of quiet for a couple of moments. It was comforting and quite beautiful to experience as singing and being in touch with my feelings sometimes is a bit foreign to me. When it occurs at first I am timid or feel even embarrassed, then it settles in, as I try to be more in my skin.


This past 24hours of getting to know some in the Decorah community has reaffirmed my commitment to people, space and peace, as Daniel/Liz, Andrea/Ian, and David and Perry-o have administered quite effortlessly. They are true examples of love and sustainability as they work together at creating spaces that nourish themselves and others. You can see this in the picture to the left as Perry-O and David look lovingly at each other after being married over 40 years.

Coming back from the farm, Liz sang another song, and getting over my shyness I sang along with her, and made a commitment with Andy, that we would also incorporate song into our lives, at any whim. Granted this will be a process, as we both are reluctant, however, I took my first stab as we biked back to the campground.

Passing on your left to the campground
round the closed signs and crack'd pavement
Passing by the river and the trees to the left
It's hard to leave Decorah
It's so hard to leave Decorah.

Here's the latest pics from Decorah.
http://www.changinggearsmovie.com/resources/photos/062308m/index.html

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.

My mouth is burning from the hot pepper soup I just consumed, and my coffee is now almost gone as I finally get a chance to post on the web. We are here in the lovely town of Decorah, IA at Magpie's coffeeshop and yet again decided to stay another day longer then expected to get caught up on our media aspirations.

Just in case we didn't post it, we have had to compromise a lot of things along the way, and recently we decided that our first priority with this trip is to inspire and motivate ourselves and others through our website and the video we edit. So though we are much slower on bike then expected, the stories and friendships we are getting along the way, will be posted...hopefully sooner then later.

Here are the latest pics from the last couple of days. Unfortunately, they are a little out of order, however, you'll get the feel that we've been working hard picking strawberries, learning about alternative energies, visiting county fairs, and biking the rolling hills of Northeast Iowa.

http://www.changinggearsmovie.com/resources/photos/062308m/index.html

Also, as an update, we have interviewed a handful of people since Jim of Timber Green, Spring Green.
Marty Larson, owner of Prairie Peddler, and past city, planner talked to us about sustainability and Prairie du Chien and his transition from city planner to owner of a bike shop that is educating and inspiring others, especially families, to ride bikes. In addition after spending with them, he and his wife, Lisa, are creating a sustainable environment for their family, by shopping and eating locally(and researching and finding out what is in the local community if they can't find it), consciously deciding to work and live within a couple of blocks from their employment, riding their bikes, providing community space and local jam sessions at the bike shop, working with the city, and promoting family, bikes, art, and environment.

http://theprairiepeddler.blogspot.com/

At the jam session we also talked with Kathleen Hein, City Council Member, and mother, we has initiated a Farm to School Project by randomly going to a meeting where they talked about farming. From there she let the farmers know that there was a market to sell to, as most of the farmers were sending most of their produce to Chicago or farther places. Within months, a group has been formed to try to provide a system for farmers to get their food into the schools. They are first starting with the school snack program. With just an idea, local farmers are now getting matched with the school system. Kathleen, along with Marty, also had a large part in the revitalization of downtown. Though the streets are currently under construction, the major facelift will be beneficial to the historic town.

After having a wonderful time with those in Prairie du Chien, Andy and I just barely made it out of the Mississippi River Valley, as we rode up the largest hill yet, and landed in Postville, IA. As we first rode through the town, I came to expect it look like many of the smalltowns in middle America. Generalizing, but a little rundown, maybe quaint, mostly Caucasian, instead, as we huffed up the rolling hill past the Postville welcome sign "Hometown to the World", my curiosity was peaked.

Indeed, immediately as we passed the turn of the century Germanic looking church, we see Hasidic Jews walking the streets toward the south, and as we continued north, hometown generalized America, looks more like little Mexico, with what appears to be a major HIspanic presence with it's restaurants and bakeries. Even further north as we see the campground sign, we stumble on an all white baseball game going on next to the fair that begun earlier that morning. In the course of 10 minutes, we did go around part of the world anyway. At first glance, i'll admit, it seemed a bit surreal, and out of place, which normally I actually like, but this particular evening just felt weird and disconnected.

I don't know how the obvious different cultures mesh, or if they do, and we didn't stay long enough to find out, however, we did realize that Postville, a town of over 2200, recently has gained national attention as having the biggest immigration raid in the US, as over 500 were detained from AgriProcessors last month. As I am concurrently writing this and going to the internet to find out more, I'm learning the tens of violations that AgriProcessors have committed over the years, the economic depression that Postville faced during the 80s, the plant that processes over 60,000chickens a day that provides Kosher meats around the nation, the many woman and children that are now left behind, and the immigration dilemmas that have yet to be solved her and across the nation.

Granted, I need to read and research more, but what hits me now more emotionally then intellectullay is the many issues we have yet to address as a nation, when 500 people, mostly Hispanic heritage, have been detained, from a kosher and non kosher plant that processes over 60,000chickens a day... I mean, really, we need to be raising questions and having open dialogues on human rights, economic development, racism, community/culture, food, etc. All of issues have been in some way been made visible in middle America for a short while, and we rode right through it. These conflicts are at everyone's backdoor. knocking, very loudly. So my question to the individual, to the community, to the nation, is when will we start looking at the system as a whole, rather then as disconnected pieces and communicating? http://jcarrot.org/interview-with-an-agriprocessors-mashgiach/

Okay, enough of that, as I am finally hungry again.

More on the Decorah stop, as the town seems to be addressing many of the issues or at least having some sort of dialogue.

Melissa:)

Just put a new gallery up. Beautiful country we're going through, and great people. It gets harder and harder to leave these places and keep moving on, but we've got to. We've also got a commitment to going back to Bloomington and starting our next phase there. But Decorah is wonderful.

Here are the pictures:
http://www.changinggearsmovie.com/resources/photos/062308/index.html

It's worth noting that when I updated the website a few days ago, the structure of the site changed and made some of the old links invalid. In most of the site structure, I think I've fixed the links, but old blog posts that point to picture directories may not work.

I'm going to go through and try to fix them now, but if one doesn't work, all of the photo galleries are accessible via the photo page here:
http://www.changinggearsmovie.com/photo.html

The last 2 nights we've been in Decorah, IA. Honestly, I never considered that Iowa might hold one of my favorite places, but Decorah is making a good case for inclusion. It turns out that NorthEast Iowa is more rolling hills than flat cornfields. That, along with their terrible roads, makes for tough biking. But Decorah is a gem here. It's a little college town of about 8000, nestled in hilly forest bluffs along a river. Our campsite is right on a noisy, rushing stream, and we've been welcomed with generous, open arms since we got here.

There's a great local co-op, a terrific downtown strip, and lots of community character, which is predominantly Norwegian. Yesterday we were given tours of two great off the grid houses in the nearby countryside, and met a few people who really impressed me more than I can quickly describe (since we need to tear down camp to go interview one of them). The lives of Liz and Daniel, David and Perry-O are really inspiring to me. They've all established themselves here in this off the grid way, and it is amazing to see working so well after I've read about homes like theirs so much.


But there's another component that I find just as important, and it is a younger generation of people who seem dedicated and bright as well. Ian and Andrea are moving into the homestead of David and Perry-O, and they have great ideas about getting things off the ground themselves. Liz and Daniel's daughters exhibit much of their parent's idealism, and I feel sure that they will both be tremendously successful women with the confidence and love their parents have blessed them with.

Finally, John Snyder and his dog Jim. We met John and Jim along the river Saturday evening and told him about our trip. He orchestrated us meeting Liz and Daniel, and really got the ball rolling on all of this. He also drove us around yesterday as we met all of these fine folks, and really showed us a great time. We were lucky to meet you, John, and we wish you and Jim all the best.


Signing off for now, but I hope I can write more later.

PS I didn't forget about Brad, but I want to talk about the extracycle in another post. :)

Unfortunately, we had to make the decision of not going up to La Farge at Organic Valley as the rains have thwarted us, as did our speed. Nonetheless and fortuitously, we landed at Prairie Peddler in Pairie du Chien, where Marty and his wife, along with their little girls treated us like family, introduced us to the sustainable happenings in town, and even had a jam session in the evening. We have again been enriched by the random people we have met along the way. We now will continue west to Decorah!


Here's the latest pictures of Timber Green, Boscobel, riding, etc.
http://www.changinggearsmovie.com/resources/photos/062008m/index.html

Prairie du Chien has been good to us. Marty from Prairie Peddler is great, as are his family and friends. I'm kind of sad to be leaving, but also happy to be moving onto a new state. Wisconsin has been great, but we've got to keep moving and finding new adventures.

I put a bunch of videos that Melissa assembled up in the new short video page. Check it out if you have some time. I'm going to split them up later to make the download time more reasonable, but if you have a fast connection it is manageable now.

On to Decorah, IA and Seed Savers. Goodbye, Wisconsin, you have been wonderful!

June 16, 2008:

I’m stuffed with my new found love of bread pudding, at the commodious Unique Café, where the walls are plastered with old time memorabilia indicating a once vibrant community, as the metal signs of plant kussmaul hybrid and “good feeding is no accident…It’s Occident Feeds” obstruct my view. For the next hour, as the café closes at 2pm, along with many of the other restaurant in the town of Boscobel, I am here without Andy writing my thoughts for the day. He’s over at the library, where they have wi-fi; the only place in town other then the highly recommended Carshop. I still don’t understand why the carshop advertises wi-fi, nor why people recommend it as the place to go as I picture myself riding up to the garage door with my trailer and bike to park a seat on the warm pavement to check my email, as other do the same, but as they wait for their cars to be repaired. Though it seems ridiculous, it must work, as it comes highly recommended.

Since we have left the first of June, we have interviewed over 14people through IN, IL, and WI, in farming, business, and at the munipality level, and we haven’t done a good job at giving the information we have learned publicly. So, we’ve decided to stay in Bascaobel for a couple of days, as there seems to be not too much to do to distract us, and fortunately, the library closes at 8pm, to finally hanker down and edit/post.

I would like to say that all of this has been easy riding; however, it has been difficult sometimes at figuring out what the best decision should, could, or would be on where to go, our overall goals, time, etc. What I’ve learned as it gets down to it, any decision is the right one for the moment, as beautifully illustrated on the coffeecup Andy drank out of earlier. I need to be reminded of that as it seems we are always compromising something, the biking, the editing, the quality time with our new and old friends, awareness of our surroundings, moments with Andy, etc. So, yesterday after Andy and I got to one our frustration points it was clear that our main goal of this trip is to convey, through media, the innovative and many times common sense sustainable practices that are going on in the nation. As we realized this at a rest stop somewhere between spring green and Port Andrew, the last 24 hours have been much smoother.

A couple of lessons that I have learned this past 24hours:

When you let life enfold without resistance, it really is easier;

Working together takes commitment, but is much healthier;

And it’s a good thing we are almost out of WI, as the bread pudding is giving me extra pounds.

Obviously, we gave the site a bit of a facelift.

I wanted to add a picture last night, and I started tinkering. Before you knew it, the whole site had been redesigned. It wasn't part of the plan, but it flowed pretty well and I just went with it. Hopefully it will work for people.

Please give us your feedback and we'll take it under advisement. I've still got a few pages to flesh out and I'll be working on them in the next few days, but generally I like what the new look does for the site, and I think some of the functions are much improved.

We're almost out of Wisconsin, and I think we're ready to move on. The state is lovely, with verdant, rolling hills and lots of people with great attitudes on life. I've been very impressed being here, and not a few times have I thought that Wisconsin has figured out a few things that Indiana has lost somewhere.

One of the big ones is something that Melissa brought up: cultural heritage is really a presence here. Pockets of population seem to be very much in touch with their european roots of one kind or another. It's quaint and parochial, but endearing in equal measure.

A little thing that is worth commenting on is that Wisconsin seems to have excellent roads, with good shoulders being so common that it is really a downer when you come to a spot that doesn't have them. Bike lanes are also very common, with most towns narrowing the roadway as soon as you enter, then having a painted bike lane throught he whole of town.

whoops, cafe is closing, gotta post and run...

Well, not really. We're in a town called Boscobel, but there seems to be no phone access, next to no internet access, and we're kind of in limbo. We decided this morning that we needed to catch up with blogging, which seems rather more difficult when we can't connect to the internet with our computers.

I'm blogging now from their public library, which has an absurd system to keep their wi-fi "safe" called Clean Access. It demands that you have an updated AV program and the latest Windows update, but won't let you get anywhere to download them if you don't have them, so we are in a pickle. So we can't get our computers connected. No pictures, no video, no quick checking of anything like email. We're kind of stuck.

I'm sure tomorrow we'll move on and find something better, but for now we're stuck in Boscobel.

-Andy

We've had an adventurous couple of days, enjoying Madison(which I have a much longer post coming soon), and the wonderful randomness of Crossplains and Spring Green. As Andy expressed in his last post, we are taking the day off and enjoying each other as we've been pretty busy!:) Stay tuned...

Here's a little sampling of my pictures:
http://www.changinggearsmovie.com/resources/photos/061608m/index.html
Though i'll write more on our findings and the gracious people we met along the way, here are some of their websites.
Crossroads Coffeehouse: http://www.crossroadscoffeehouse.net/
City of Madison: http://www.cityofmadison.com/sustainability/
Madison Environmental Group: http://madisonenvironmental.com/
Spring Green Timber Growers: http://timbergrowers.com/

We got a tip in Madison that we should check out Timberggreen and their wood production operation. I'm very glad we did.

So I'll give a few pics of what we saw, but today Melissa and I are taking some time off to be with each other and unwind, because the trip is spreading us a bit thin. We'll be back tomorrow with lots of energy and enthusiasm! :)

http://www.changinggearsmovie.com/resources/photos/061608/index.html

Last night we had a wonderful time staying with and getting to know Mary, the owner of the Crossroads Coffeehouse in Cross Plains, WI. This morning, we came in to the shop and met with Kris Lohman, a librarian at the local library.

The library here is remarkable in several ways, but not least of them is that it is the first library in the state of Wisconsin to earn a LEED silver rating. I'll post more when I can about our conversation and what we saw inside, but here's a self-guided tour PDF that they have up to tell you about the library:

http://www.scls.lib.wi.us/csp/LEEDtour.pdf

Saturday June 14th:
For the second time on this trip, Andy and I pledge to let life unfold and to go with our intuition rather then trying to fit some mold or pattern. This was after we had stopped at a coffeeshop 13miles away from Madison to try to escape the storm that was brewing and met up with people in the community that were working towards a more sustainable town. Twenty minutes of staying here, we learn about their green drinks, their leed library(the first in WI), dialogues groups, and a coffeeshop that prides itself on buying locally made products, and a woman who is creating the space for community.

Mary Devitt, owner of Crossroads coffeehouse, has a spark and love for curiosity and continues to question how we can make changes in the world that is sustainable. Through her coffeeshop she has provided the space for discussion on sustainability, and in a year and half of being open, is getting to the point of having her customers work on some sort of project. She coordinates and mediates situations and connects individuals effortlessly. In addition has a kind and warm personality. Within a fifteen minute conversation she graciously offers us a place to stay at her wooded retreat only minutes away. Andy and I do a little internal debate, but not to long, as this is just one of the many serendipitous moments where it makes sense to say yes. After we've figured our accommodation, she also calls the librarian, Chris, to show us around the LEED certified library in the morning. So within less then an hour, we have a shoot, a bed, and more ideas because we decided to let life naturally unfold.



Though we only traveled 13 miles, we were happy with the decision, and spent the rest of the evening chatting with Mary on community building, change, action. And in this town of 3000, Crossplains, she particularly saw the need to not only provide good coffee and promote local products,in her town, she was even more concerned to create a place where people could come together and talk, as there were few gathering spaces other then the bar. It seemed to be successful, as now on Sunday, the place is packed.

So after a restful night, the next morning, she had arranged a meet up with Chris, the librarian who showed us the LEED certified library. As we interviewed Chris, I continued to be amazed at how much the community and different entities were involved in the process, and how it seemed there was a clear buy-in at the grassroots level to the municipal level. Not only did the members have the vision, but the strength to do it, when no other library in the state had yet to be certified. They took what many would seem as a chance, but as Chris stated they are going to long term benefit from this endeavor, and in a simple example their energy costs are half of what they used to be.


After leaving Chris and Mary, I'm inspired even more so in community building and providing space to move forward or not necessarily move forward, but again get back to common sense where politics and names are dissolved, where humanity and life reign. This journey continues to challenge where my passions could lie, or where my energies would be consumed, and i'm hopeful that when I get back to Bloomington there will be the focus that I am craving.

We are now going to try to make it to Spring Green, WI. As Andy and I said yesterday, we probably could the whole summer just in WI, as there seems to be a lot of sustainable thinking, and ACTION going on, and it's not just in the cities, it's in the small towns. Who knows how long it will take to get out of this state, but as i've said before we are taking it as it enfolds. Stay tuned.

Open your mind. Doors you don't even know about are waiting to open for you.

We rode today with the trailers for the first time since we got to Madison. We've had 6 days with little riding, except for a few short jaunts around Chicago and Madison, and we were suffering when we hit the road today. The plan was to ride around 40 miles to Spring Green where there are 3 items of interest: Frank Lloyd Wright's home at Taliesen, The House on the Rock, and Timbergreen Forestry, a woodworking practice that takes trees through their whole lifecycle, growing, harvesting, processing and making the final wood products. It's a good area, and I was excited about getting up there.

But reality intervened as always. We stayed up late the night before, meeting up with my old friend Alex, his friend Patrick, and a few friends of Melissa's who I didn't really get to talk to as much as I would have liked. We went out for a few drinks and dinner and had a great time relaxing, but we were really drained today when we tried to get going. Between packing the trailers, getting some food for the road, showering and putting Noah's apartment back to pretty much the way we found it, we didn't get on the road until almost noon. At that point, we were already feeling drained and hadn't really even had breakfast. It was a poor way to start our journey into the hilly lands northwest of Madison.

The wind didn't help us, being in our face in the early afternoon. But the day was sunny and bright, and we were trying to put what energy we could into making progress. We ended up stopping in a little suburb/town outside of Madison called Middleton, where there was a street festival in full swing. Melissa ordered food from a little diner, and we sat on a bench eating and listening to live music from about a block away. It was a nice reprieve, and we hit the road again after eating our fill.

The afternoon was pretty rough on both of us, and as we rolled into Cross Plains, about 13 miles from our starting point, we were already tired from fighting the wind and our late night. We stopped at a frozen custard shop to get something cool to drink, and picked up the Madison newspaper to look at the road closing map. With all the flooding, we weren't even sure we could get to our destinations for the next few days, so we needed to check. After confirming that we were on nearly the only road that was clear in the state, we dragged ourselves back on the bike and rode through the rest of this town of around 3000.

Storms were on the horizon, and heading towards us. We started to look for cover, but I remembered seeing a coffee shop in town. Since we hadn't checked email or posted today, I suggested we turn back and get some shelter. We made it just in time to beat the real downpour, and pulled our bikes into a little hallway in the complex that held the shop. When we came in, I asked the barista and one customer what was going on in the town for sustainability, and they said they didn't really know, but the owner would tell us when she came in.

We got coffee and did a few tasks on the computers, and the rain came and went. Eventually, the owner arrived, and Mike, the barista, sent her over to talk to us.

Let's just say that one thing leads to another and before you know it we are staying at the home of the owner, a wonderful lady named Mary, we're doing a piece tomorrow morning on the first LEED certified library in Wisconsin, and we've made a great new friend. On a day when we were struggling to get to the next story on sustainability, that story came to us. Tonight I'm writing from Mary's living room, after we interviewed her and had a great dinner. Tomorrow we'll tour the town library and see how far we get on the road, but part of me feels like it doesn't matter how far we get, because we'll find a great story no matter where we end up.

Some photos of the last couple of days:

http://www.changinggearsmovie.com/Photo/061508/index.html

And a video of some of the crazy weather yesterday:

I don't think I even took my camera out today, except for a little joking around this morning. But we got to take a lot of video, and even a special audio interview today, and I feel like we got a ton of good material.

Today we scheduled a whirlwind of interviews, and they went almost without a hitch. The only concession we had to make for time was doing one interview in audio form only over the phone. Honestly, it worked so well that I want to do more interviews like it in the future, just to expand the geographic scope of who we can talk to.

We've decided to spend another day in Madison, though. While we want to hit the road to not lose too much time, today's interviews went past 4pm, and we wouldn't really make it that far after that hour. We will spend some time catching up tonight, then ride for the House on the Rock tomorrow, a museum of sorts that Melissa has been raving about since we started talking about coming through Wisconsin. It's about half way to La Farge, our next official stop, but I have a feeling we're going to see a lot of closed roads between here and there from the flooding. We'll see how possible it is for us to make it there in 2 days of riding.

I'm not going to post too much tonight, as I need to catch up with email, but I'll leave with a thought about a message one of our interviewees sent me today. He suggested that people like us don't necessarily need to make all of these changes (towards sustainability) ourselves, but only create the conditions for change to occur, and the rest will fall into place. I think he's largely right.

That said, a lot of the work that needs to be done is in creating the educational foundation for people to understand the problems we are facing. After that, creating reasonable, understandable lifestyle options for lifestyle that don't compromise the environment and making them easily available to the population is essential. People will only change very slowly if they need to seek out and work hard at to make the changes.

But I think both can and will happen in the next 3-4 years. Out here, it really feels like we're on the cusp of the tide turning on these things. Peak oil seems to be here already. Gas supplies not increasing to meet demand would imply that we're close, at least. I've seen already in the news that things like car sales are already reacting to the new conditions (though not nearly fast enough).

These kind of behavior changes are both encouraging and frustrating. Encouraging because it becomes obvious that at least a portion of our society can identify trends like rising fuel costs and react in a rational way. Frustrating because there is the huge problem of Global Warming that cannot be addressed in this kind of consumer-reaction way. People don't react to increasing carbon parts-per-million. They are invisible and (without government pricing) free. People will react to increasing temperatures, but the survivalist/utilitarian/individualist reaction is more likely to take the form of geographic relocation or, in the best case, adopting new living arrangements to allow for their new climates. Even if societies recognize that carbon heating is causing widespread problems, the existing science indicates that the feedback loop for global warming is very long, more likely to be decades than years. So even if there are proactive actions taken to address the problem, it would be years before they have any impact at all, and it would be likely that the warming would continue in the interim.

I'm pessimistic about our ability to address global warming. We've honestly failed already to address Peak Oil. I've read some of the literature about Peak Oil, and I've just honestly thought about what the effect will be when oil gets to be in short supply. It's not pretty. It's not just about transportation becoming expensive. Conventional plastics go away. Gas and diesel for farm implements go away. Most fertilizer goes away. Most of the food supply chain breaks down. Most of the materials supply chain breaks down.

We've probably got enough gas left to last us for a good long while (10-20 years). Prices will increase until it isn't worth it to buy the stuff anymore. At that point, we've either converted transportation of people and goods to non-oil methods, or we're in trouble. The Amish can't feed us all.

I'm pessimistic that people will make the changes on their own to recreate their lives in a way that isn't dependent on oil. I hope I'm wrong.

To my surprise, when I moved back to the midwest I couldn't deny the fact that I wanted the opportunity to go hiking in the desert or mountains within an hours drive, the fresh produce all year round, random casual walking in the San Diego Zoo with Sharney, as she gave me her free passes, and scrabble playing with Jean on my other home of Coronado. And though i'm originally a Michagander, unconsciously after six years of being away from the midwest, I had become a San Diego urbanite.

I had left San Diego because I was ready for a change as my AmeriCorps position with Survivors of Torture, International was ending, I had the travel bug again, and, I met a great guy, Noah, who is now Andy and I's gracious host for the next couple of days. Noah received the opportunity to go to UW for a PhD program in History. And I received an offer to work on service-learning projects with Wisconsin Campus Campact for AmeriCorps VISTA. I wanted to follow my love, though I didn't realize how difficult acclimating to this town would be, as I remember putting two pairs of leggings on, an old stuffy coat, and not looking anyone in the face for months as I just wanted to get to my destination without having my eyelashes freeze.

Quick blog. Madison is great. I love the town and I'm hopeful that Bloomington can get to this level someday. The commerce is great, the planning is great, the people seem very cool, and mostly there's just a good vibe.

Today we made a slew of interview appointments for tomorrow, and we're wildly diverging from our original plan. I think I prefer this on-the-fly chaos to our perhaps over planned original itinerary. I gain fulfillment from solving the problems that come up every day, every hour when we are working on the fly, and I love the possibilities that open up just from us approaching new people.

Today we got appointments for tomorrow with a couple of great organizations and some of the city government staff who are really moving things in a positive direction here. We're doing 4 interviews with not much break in-between, which is by far the most rapid barrage of taping we've done yet. It will be interesting to see how that goes. :)

We also stopped by the local independent newspaper office, Isthmus, just to let them know what we were up to. They're something like NUVO in Indy, if you are familiar with that paper. We ended up sitting down for an interview with one of their writers, David Medaris, who turned out to be really in the know on many of the issues we're interested in. It was a great 2-way conversation, and he already put up some video from our interview and an article about us on their site. It's amazing how fast things come together sometimes. Check it out:

http://www.thedailypage.com/daily/article.php?article=22938

Tonight we're going to work hard on editing our first episode from the road. We've got tons of material, but that presents its own challenges. The rain's coming down hard, which is kind of good since we don't have much temptation to go outside, but it makes me a bit worried for the folks out in Wisconsin who have already been inundated in the last week.

I'll leave you with a gallery of pics from the last couple of days. I'm fascinated with taking pictures of my food (and Melissa's) lately. Enjoy! :)

http://www.changinggearsmovie.com/Photo/061108/index.html

A small sample of what we've seen in NW Indiana and Chicago. Practicing taking pics from the back of the bike with one hand on the bars. It's amazing how much image stabilization in modern cameras can do.

http://www.changinggearsmovie.com/Photo/061008/index.html

My last post was pretty much a play by play, but I need to catch up over a few days, and I want to give as good of a run-down of everything as I can in the evening I've got left in Chicago. That's a long way of saying that I'm going to try and be brief with my post about Moody Farms. There's a lot to say, and there's a lot of good going on there, but we'll have to get to that in the video I guess.

When we arrived at the house, Adam let us put the bikes and trailers inside his shed, then we were invited in for a quick shower and a great dinner with the family. While his wife Lucy was preparing most of the meal, Adam and a rotating cast of family members spoke with us out on the porch. Adam and Lucy's daughter Rachel, son Isaac and their spouses, along with their grandson Oliver joined us for conversation and dinner as a storm front rolled by in the distance. Isaac played a bit of guitar before Adam put the Moody Meats BaconBurger patties on the grill. Dinner was great for a couple of hungry cyclists, and the whole family was wonderful and generous to us.

After eating, Adam took Melissa and I on a Ranger tour of the farm. We toured the laying chicken coops, saw the small herd of cattle, and went down to the old homestead (now home to Rachel and her family) to see the hens that have been sent out to pasture and the main farm machinery. It was refreshing to see a farmer like my father who was using older equipment, well suited to the smaller-scale farm and do-it-yourself mechanics.


After the tour, we sat down with Adam for a short interview and a glass of wine that he'd brought back from that day's business trip to Bloomington's Oliver Winery. It was a fun interview, even though I was struggling to stay awake by the end from the wine and the long day on the bike.

We were given a wide choice of where to sleep for the night, and opted for the chaise lounges on the porch. That night there was a storm front going north of the farm, offering a great view and a nice breeze through the night.

Adam woke us at what seemed like such an early hour, even though it was after 7 and we were only tired from the long day before. He was kind enough to offer us orange juice, although we didn't have time for breakfast since we needed to get to the chicken coops to see the flock getting culled.

We groggily threw on some clothes and rode our bikes up to the end of the lane where we had filmed Isaac the night before. Adam took us out to the huts in the Ranger, while Isaac and Brandon drove the 4x4 truck with a livestock trailer on the back. We got a front-row seat to watch the guys gather up the hens, which they did very efficiently, grabbing the hens by the leg with one hand, and then transferring them over to the other hand. They could hold 4 chickens in one hand, gripping them with one leg between each of their fingers.

After watching the guys gather up the broilers, we headed back to the house with Adam to try some of the Lone Pine eggs, gathered fresh that morning. I didn't see them prepared, but I take it they were steam-fried. The whites were cooked, then folded over the slightly runny yolk, something like a mini-omelet. Seasoned only with salt and pepper, they were still very rich, tasty eggs. Moody's eggs are much more orange than what I'm used to seeing, but they were very good, even for someone who doesn't normally care for runny eggs.

When we finished off the eggs, we packed our trailers into Adam's SUV and headed over to their processing plant in Ladoga. He wanted us to see the chickens being processed by his crew, and while I took some photos he was a bit worried about negative reactions from our audience, so
I'm only going to share one.

I was surprised at my reaction to the slaughtering, or really to my lack of reaction. Seeing the chickens go from living, breathing animals to the carcases we're used to seeing in the grocery was amazing. It took the Moody crew about 2 minutes to kill and clean a bird, and while I can't confess to wanting to join the process, I wasn't turned off at all. They were professional, concerned with sanitation and health, and the process seemed as merciful as possible considering that they were killing an animal and reducing it to meat.

As we were leaving Moody Meats, I asked Adam if we could use their meat scale to weigh our trailers. I'd been curious about their weight after being so tired the day before, and I really wanted to see what we were towing.

It turned out that the A/V trailer was 103 pounds, and the camping trailer was 85. We were aiming for 50 pounds each, so this was a bit of a rude awakening. But we got back on the road and headed North, wishing the Moodys well and being thoroughly impressed with their family and operation.

I guess I didn't do a great job of staying brief, but that's the way I am.

I have more to write about our serendipitous day, however, as we finally do some laundry, log and capture today's interview, get caught up, all I can give you for the time being is some pictures. Enjoy! :)

http://www.changinggearsmovie.com/resources/photos/060908M/index.html

A few quick thoughts while we're sitting in a cafe updating things and trying to do some work:

After traveling over close to 200miles, somehow skirting the devastating storms of the Midwest, we finally get into Chicago, not on time, missing appointments, and probably inconveniencing our lovely host just a wee bit. Nonetheless, we've had a day to let our muscles relax, even if going up stairs my muscles yell to me, "oh, no not, another, please not another step, how bout you take the creepy icebox of an elevator". Instead I climb the three flights, just because I feel I should be so as to use other muscles, as Andy recommended so that they don't atrophy. However, really, I'm excited to have my legs toned and buff, and my stomach and arms flabby.

So today, we've headed to the FirstSlice Pie Cafe, where the proceeds of their organic/local delights go back to feeding those who go hungry. These baked yummies of light, fluffy lemon bars, flourless peanut butter cookies, and mocha muffins go well with Andy and I's craving stomach, and I love that we're helping in a little way by eating them. It's tough work, so "give me more, I say", as I am eyeing the coffee toffee pie, and now debating on getting the goat cheese, parched pear roasted vegetable sandwich.

I digress, so let me go back a couple days. We covered what students are doing at DePauw for their sustainability internship program, Moody Meats/Farm, Biotown(Reynolds, IN), and we were going to check our Fair Oaks Cheese store, but accidentally passed it by north wind miles, so going back south seemed to daunting. We continued onward to Crown Point, IN, and though we didn't have a video footage stop, Andy's friends were gracious in letting us stay with them for the night, giving us food, and time to catch up on blogging, sleeping, and basically providing us with whatever we needed if they had it.

After a restful sleep, Jim and Susan, our hosts, yet again provided a meal, chatted the latest earlyday news, and packed us with goods of fruit leather, a random cinnamon toast box, peanut butter, and sourdough pretzels, plus they gave us valuable information, as to how in the world to maneuver through the busy streets up to Chicago, with their handy northern Indiana bike trail map.

We left with our waves and hugs, again feeling as if I were part of their family to the nearest bike path of Erie Lackawanna only miles away. As we got to the trail and ride north on the long stretch it truly felt a reprieve from what we were enduring days before. Here's a bit of my excitement( I apologize for the head getting caught off, I'm only getting better!):



The excitement faded after being on a bike for over nine hours. Though the trail was smooth and easier to navigate, we lost a bit of time when we had to figure out the road share routes as the markers weren't clear, and a bit confusing from the map, and to the our discredit we were getting frustrated and were becoming less aware of details, so that could have had something to do with it. Plus, oh, those wonderful high winds passed through that drenched us, made us invisible to cars, and just plain made us grouchy and even more exhausted. By the end, Andy and I had had our cap with the weather and even with each other, and we still had over 9 miles to go.




Thankfully, we could see the skyline of Chicago and it felt like we were in the home stretch on North Shore Lane, a beautiful ride around Lake Michigan, passing festivals, marinas, people enjoying the beach, other riders, rollarbladers, walkers, and the numerous smells that wafted by as we continued to pedal. As I heard dance music, saw the the endless water of Lake Michigan, remembering my fond beach days as I lived a couple blocks from the Pacific Ocean on Coronado, CA(right across from San Diego), and being in the present moment of just loving the ride, I finally received my second wind.

Labels: Bike Routes of Northern Indiana to Chicago

Biotown, Thursday:

We ride into a town that looks just like other rural ones plotted across the US. A couple of restaurants, the local bar, family businesses struggling to keep afloat, a place where farming industry reigns and where there is little other industry, unless you drive to the next town over, and for me what marks the similarity to that of other towns, is that you get the sense that at one time the place was hopping and people walked the streets talking to their neighbors, or going uptown to get the store to get the weekly icecream special. The luster seems a bit worn, and now the towns seem eerily misplaced. Something changed, and though I can’t quite put my finger on it, something doesn’t fit as the sidewalks have no one walking on them, though those that do pass are in their air-conditioned vehicles in the streets. It’s quiet of its romanticized town culture.

Though the town we rolled into, would be described as above, it had a moment only a couple years back that put it on the map and provided a bit of renewed hope, as the department of Agriculture declared Reynolds, IN, to be the pilot for a self sufficient town using bio fuels. Since the area is laden with large scale corn and soy farmers, it seemed to make sense why the Ag dept would want to try it there, so they put money in to building an ethanol plant, the tracks to provide commodity movement, worked with the local dealers on providing a heavily reduced price to buy flex fuel car to its citizens, as one random person in town advised us, and with the capital coming in the town agreed to change their name from Reynolds to Bio-Town, with Senator Luger providing the fanfare. Even, the Reynolds BP was the first in the state to offer 85%ethanol. So it seemed well on its way, until the demand caught up with the supply, and then everything was put on hold until further notice.

About two years ago, I was seriously thinking of starting my own biofuel transportation business, and the prospects looked good, so I understand and actually applaud the town and dept for trying to figure a way we wouldn’t be so reliant on gas, use and utilize the local resources and push new energies to the market, and provide a more stable local economy; in addition, the studies at the time seemed to indicate that biofuels ran cleaner, where better for the environment, decreased our reliance on unstable reserves overseas, etc. And though I backed out of my venture, mostly based because I had unresolved issues with GMOs behind the bio-fuels, after stopping at Bio-town, I wonder,as another mentioned in the town, as who had the longterm foresight? Do we need to be looking at long term solutions, and how does that solution effect other systems? Especially as corn is going for feed, food, and energy, what systems are in place to ensure a sustainable future for small towns like bio-town, or for the rest of the world? It's clear we need something other then the system we currently have as gas is at 4.50a gallon, but what long term innovation would move us to a more sustainable system?

Moody Farms, Day 3

Waking up to the continuous rain outside, we delay our journey by an hour, and head north to Waveland to visit Moody Farms. Though we discussed grabbing food for lunch and to just have something for our future supply, we somehow forget in the midst of memorizing the tens of back roads, and forge ahead. Our first miles out we come across a washed out road, where we take off our sturdy biking shoes and replace them with civilian sandals and slowly push the bikes and trailers through it. Thankfully, and surprisingly nothing gets wet. Andy is excited with the adventure, as am I as yesterday’s travel on highway 231 consisted of the spewing fast moving vehicles whizzing by us. However, our giddiness for the serene farm land, and closed out bridge to our backs, fades, as the back roads turn to constant hilly, gravel terrains that continually impede our journey, making us that much slower.

After pushing and pulling our bikes and trailers at roughly 100lbs each for seven hours, finally we head down the muddy Moody Farm lane and are greeted by the younger Moody, Isaac, and Brandon, the Mennonite intern. As we get off our bikes, we quickly discover that we are going to the broiler chickens to feed them, many for the last time, as they will single handedly be picked to be slaughtered in the early morning. Unbeknown to us at the time, we later experience the process.

So in any case, Andy and I, still sweaty, smelly, and sticky, and let me add, still catching our breaths and now famished, look at each other and give the “go with the flow” head nod, and give in to our first assignment. The night continues in a somewhat a similar fashion, as we then meet the head of the family and the mover and shaker behind the Moody Farms, Adam Moody. He warmly takes us into his family, letting us shower, rest a bit, and enjoy the delicious meal they prepare, shows us all around the different parts of the farm and process, offers a bedroom, though we take the patio instead to sleep under the stars, and basically gets us integrated with his gracious family.

Adam talks passionately and rationally about the cycles of his crop rotations, the importance of family, his business and being part of the process every step of the way. This was reinforced as we were there in the evening to feed the chickens, we picked eggs from the hens, which is another part of the business, saw how he raises his chickens, how they round them up for slaughter, the slaughter process, to what one would eat that night. As a semi-vegetarian, I haven’t ate a chicken since thinking my goose bumps on my arms resembled chicken legs, I was surprisingly comfortable with process, and realized that it does make a difference when you know the people preparing your meat. I saw how they care for the land, how the buy the expensive kelp, because it’s good for the chickens and us as we get our minerals, how the keep there corn on the cob throughout the season to retain its nutrients, even though many farmers don’t because of the room one needs, and those on the farm get a decent wage, fair and equitable. They live and act as if everything is connected, and it's astonishing to see when compared to our current food system where agribusiness reigns over agriculture.

Moody farms is truly a family business, but one that allows flexibility to the persons interest. Such as, Adam continues to work with his children and his wife on ways to make the business better, create opportunities that interests them. Such as Chad, whose interest is in web design, so he works on that, or he comes up with recipes for the meat, as his interest is food. In a time, when the average farmer age is over 60, when price per pound is close to what it was decades ago, besides corn, it actually surprised me that his family, his kids around Andy and I’s age, are doing something with the business. I attribute that to Adam's flexibility and foresight.

In 15hours of being with the Moody’s, I truly get the sense that family is a number one priority, and that working a sustainable farm makes sense ecologically and economically. They opened all their doors for us to see the operation, and what I saw was how truly things are interconnected.

After a day of being stranded in Greencastle, first by rain, then by our own aversion to risking the storms, we headed out Wednesday morning. The morning was beautiful - a little humid, but sunny and dry. We had decided to take country roads instead of the highway to get to Moody farms, a local meat and poultry provider that had been recommended to us by Bloomingfoods . A couple of hours on bustling 231 had convinced us that the rural routes would be a better alternative.

So we took a few twists and turns on city streets in Greencastle, then we came through a railroad underpass. On one side was residential Greencastle. The other side was immediately recognizable as rural Indiana. We passed a couple of farmhouses that had seen better days, then we came down a gentle hill only to find the road was flooded. This wasn't a little flood that covered over a culvert, either. The roadbed stretched around a bend up ahead and we couldn't see pavement again through the entire curve.

I didn't want to give up the country roads yet, so I volunteered to put on my sandals and see how deep the water really got. I walked up a few hundred feet to where the water was rushing out of a flooded farm creek onto the road. It got up past my ankles, but not much further, so I waded back and we decided to push on through it. We left Melissa's bike on the near side of the creek, and we pushed one bike at a time through the creek while the other took pictures.

Our trailers proved their worth, keeping all of our gear just out of the muddy water, even if they got sprayed a bit themselves. We took off again through the hilly farmland, enjoying the ride thoroughly. The worst part about the country roads are the dogs, but it seemed such a good day that when we crested a small hill in front of a house with 3 dogs, they just stood on a little ridge off the road looking at us, without a bark or a growl. At the time, I figured we were just going so slow they were trying to figure out what was wrong with us.

In the valley below the dogs, there was a bit of partially flooded farmland on either side of a raised roadway. We could see a steel bridge frame in the distance, and an odd stop sign about 100 feet in front of it. Odd because there didn't seem to be any crossroads to stop for, just the bridge a little farther ahead. We pulled ahead up to the bridge, and found out why: the bridge entry was piled high with rock to block off what much have been a condemned country bridge. The girders were twisted away from the bridge frame on one side, and the water was nearly up to the bottom of the wooden bridge boards.

It was a bit intimidating to look out on a condemned-looking bridge that was inches above a river rushing rapidly by, but we made the choice to cross. It was miles back to town now, through the flood again and probably 45 minutes of riding. We had to keep pressing forward. We took the bikes over one at a time again, with no trouble at all. On the far side of the bridge, we found ourselves on gravel road. It was the first of many of a very rough day of travel.

The gravel kept going for a couple of miles in that stretch. At the time, I thought it was an anomoly: a bridge that needed repairs and a road spur that needed paving seemed to be a good pairing. As it turned out, we would hit gravel all day off and on. Google maps seems to not differentiate between gravel and pavement at the county road level, much to our dismay.

The worst stretch of gravel we hit was in front of a toxic dumpsite about 3 miles South of Moody Farms. We both have skinny road tires on our bikes, and small gravel or dirt roads work ok for them. But this road had a thick layer of the large, chunky gravel. With the large chunks, our narrow tires start to sink into the gravel and slide around all over the place. It got so bad that after a little shile we had to dismount and push the bikes on foot for about half of a mile. By the end of the pushing, we were exhausted, but the gravel road t-ed ahead, and we were praying for pavement. To our dismay, it was still gravel, although it was the smaller stuff this time, and much more manageable.

As a side note, on the thick gravel road, we passed a huge site that looked much like a landfill to me. I asked about it later and one of the locals told me it was a dump site for a company in Florida. He didn't know that much about the materials, but he did say they were toxic and they didn't much care for visitors. I had seen the "no tresspassing" signs as we passed around the huge, gated facility. The local man also told me that the reason there was a huge dump site there was that there were no zoning laws in the county. Seems like anything goes in the area because there's no regulation.

From my point of view, that total lack of regulation is an invitation to trouble. While it is true that zoning can sometimes seem onerous, I've been to enough planning meetings at both the city of bloomington and monroe county to know that lax zoning regulations tend more toward disrupting the character and value of a community than enhancing it. Zoning laws don't need to be draconian to be effective, but keeping toxic waste well away from farmland seems like a good idea no matter how you slice it.

A few miles later, we arrived, dusty and tired, at a barn that said "Moody Lone Pine Farm." It was a simple white farmhouse with a pair of older, white barns. Melissa phoned her contact, Isaac, who told us that they were working up the road about a half-mile, so we dragged ourselves back into the saddle to ride this final stretch up to meet the farmers.

We came up to a little dirt and gravel road that was partially flooded out, but led up to a group of smaller modern farm buildings. There were three farmers working out at that time, but just as we rode up, one drove off on a smaller, somewhat older John Deere tractor. The other two men were busy doing a few things in the middle barn, but they greeted us as we arrived. They were Isaac, the son of the farm’s manager, and Brandon, an intern who is working the farm for a few months this year as part of his education.

Isaac was all smiles and beaming about the farm, obviously happy to be there and be talking to us. I’d guess him to be in his early twenties. Brandon was more reserved, bearded, and about the same age. Brandon said they needed to go out and get the broiler chickens up for the night. There had been storms that week, and it looked like more might be coming, so they needed to get the chickens into their shelters so that they’d be safer from the storms. We gladly hitched a ride on his 4-wheel drive utility vehicle, us sitting up front while Isaac drove and Brandon stood in the bed of the little vehicle.

We came out to two quonset hut-like structures that were mobile coops for the broiler chickens, the standard chicken bred for meat. They move these huts and their mobile electric fences around the fields periodically to bring the chickens into fresh grazing areas where the chickens eat the clover and bugs and leave behind copious nitrogenous chicken poop to re-fertilize the fields. Isaac and Brandon gave us a little tour as they corralled the chickens inside the huts for the evening. They were expecting storms during the night, and they wanted the chickens safely penned up.

Isaac told us that one pen was going to be culled tomorrow for slaughter, 125 chickens being pulled out of the 300 to take to their slaughterhouse for processing. He presented the information in a way that was more relaxed and comfortable than I would have expected. Growing up in the cultural environment I did, being around many vegetarians and a very animal-rights conscious culture in Bloomington, I guess I expected less comfort. Almost like the farmer should be sorry that he's going to have to kill these birds. That's ridiculous, of course. Isaac is comfortable with it because that's what his family does. He's been culling chickens for years, and thinks nothing of it, not only because it's routine, but because their family runs their operation in a way that isn't cruel to the chickens, and makes food for people. It took me a while to get my head around that, but even by the time I'd see the chickens slaughtered the next day, I didn't feel the remorse/revulsion/guilt that I expected. In fact, I thought that the people on the farm were doing something honest and wholesome, and I gained a lot of respect for the group of farmers and workers in their processing plant.

After they got the hens up in the huts, we took the Ranger back towards the farm buildings and Isaac took us in to see the young layer (as in egg-layer) hatchlings. 300 or so little chicks scrambled around in a heated bedding box, looking comfortable, if a bit skittish. They were at least staying out of the rain and cold, and their little place in the barn was probably as nice a place to be as any with the amount of rainwater and mud that had taken over the farm.

Once we'd taken a few pictures, we all went back out to see that Adam Moody, the farm owner, had driven up and was standing in the lane, talking on his cell phone. He was dressed more like a businessman than a farmer, with black slacks and an open-collared blue shirt. Isaac told us we could wait until he got off the phone, and momentarily that time came. Adam came over and greeted us warmly. Melissa had been their contact, so I didn't know all about the farm or the family yet. I wondered for the first few minutes whether they were brothers or father and son.

We followed Adam's car up their gravel drive. It was about the last thing I wanted to do after a long day of riding, but we weren't given a choice and we needed to get the bikes and trailers to shelter before the coming storm.

I'll write more about the evening with the Moodys in a later post....

I've been writing a post for a few days now without having wireless access or time to really finish things up. Everything is taking a little longer than we thought, and wireless is hard to find out here in the heartland.

But there are some great things to share and we'll try to catch up with our editing and posting in the next couple of days.

One great piece of news: we got covered in Wabash College's blog after we went and visited campus for a little while Thursday. Here's the link:

http://www2.wabash.edu/blog/pa/2008/06/davis_00_cross_country_in_name.html

But I want to post a few of my impressions from our travels. Starting with Weds, but I'll have to finish it up later because we need to get on the road:

6/4/08
After a day of being stranded in Greencastle, first by rain, then by our own aversion to risking the storms, we headed out Wednesday morning. The morning was beautiful - a little humid, but sunny and dry. We had decided to take country roads instead of the highway to get to Moody farms. A couple of hours on bustling 231 had convinced us that the rural routes would be a better alternative.

So we took a few twists and turns on city streets in Greencastle, then we came through a railroad underpass. On one side was residential Greencastle. The other side was immediately recognizable as rural Indiana. We passed a couple of farmhouses that had seen better days, then we came down a gentle hill only to find the road was flooded. This wasn't a little flood that covered over a culvert, either. The roadbed stretched around a bend up ahead and we couldn't see pavement again through the entire curve.

I didn't want to give up the country roads yet, so I volunteered to put on my sandals and see how deep the water really got. I walked up a few hundred feet to where the water was rushing out of a flooded farm creek onto the road. It got up past my ankles, but not much further, so I waded back and we decided to push on through it. We left Melissa's bike on the near side of the creek, and we pushed one bike at a time through the creek while the other took pictures.

Our trailers proved their worth, keeping all of our gear just out of the muddy water, even if they got sprayed a bit themselves. We took off again through the hilly farmland, enjoying the ride thoroughly. The worst part about the country roads are the dogs, but it seemed such a good day that when we crested a small hill in front of a house with 3 dogs, they just stood on a little ridge off the road looking at us, without a bark or a growl. At the time, I figured we were just going so slow they were trying to figure out what was wrong with us.

In the valley below the dogs, there was a bit of partially flooded farmland on either side of a raised roadway. We could see a steel bridge frame in the distance, and an odd stop sign about 100 feet in front of it. Odd because there didn't seem to be any crossroads to stop for, just the bridge a little farther ahead. We pulled ahead up to the bridge, and found out why: the bridge entry was piled high with rock to block off what much have been a condemned country bridge. The girders were twisted away from the bridge frame on one side, and the water was nearly up to the bottom of the wooden bridge boards.

It was a bit intimidating to look out on a condemned-looking bridge that was inches above a river rushing as fast as any I had seen, but we made the choice to cross. It was miles back to town now, through the flood again and probably 45 minutes of riding. We had to keep pressing forward. We took the bikes over one at a time again, with no trouble at all. On the far side of the bridge, we found ourselves on gravel road. It was the first of many of a very rough day of travel.

The gravel kept going for a couple of miles in that stretch. At the time, I thought it was an anomoly: a bridge that needed repairs and a road spur that needed paving seemed to be a good pairing. As it turned out, we would hit gravel all day off and on. Google maps seems to not differentiate between gravel and pavement at the county road level, much to our dismay.

The worst stretch of gravel we hit was in front of a toxic dumpsite about 3 miles South of Moody Farms. We both have skinny road tires on our bikes, and small gravel or dirt roads work ok for them. But this road had a thick layer of the large, chunky gravel. With the large chunks, our narrow tires start to sink into the gravel and slide around all over the place. It got so bad that after a little shile we had to dismount and push the bikes on foot for about half of a mile. By the end of the pushing, we were exhausted, but the gravel road t-ed ahead, and we were praying for pavement. To our dismay, it was still gravel, although it was the smallers stuff this time, and much more manageable.

To be continued... There's so much more to tell, but we have to hit the road now.

Also, a few pictures to share here quickly:

http://www.changinggearsmovie.com/Photo/060708/index.html

A second day in Greencastle wasn't what we'd planned, but I think it will turn out to be a hidden blessing. We had been struggling to keep up with a few things: contacts, webpages, etc. and we got to take a chunk out of those tasks.

We spent most of the morning trying to decide whether to hit the road or wait out the storm. I think we made the smart decision, but the weather reports turned out to be wrong as usual. In today's picture gallery, you can see a couple of pics of the report coming from weather.com on my phone. Basically, serious storms all day and night. They were right for half of it. Around 1pm, the storms slackened and we could have taken off except that we'd already paid for the hotel room for another night and we were worried that the storms would come back, since that's decidedly what was predicted for our area.

But in the afternoon, we walked around the city for a while looking for a coffee shop. We gave up finding the Mystic Bean Java Shop when I called and they said they had no wireless internet. We were going to head for the campus hotel via downtown, but we found this nice little place called the Blue Door Cafe and stepped in for what turned out to be a 7-hour coffee-fueled work session. We got the gift of a free concert by a local-ish band (one of their members moved out of state) and free wireless and power for our stay. They also had a wonderful coffee table book of castles that was nearly movie-poster size and had a full-page picture of each castle. It turns out that I'm not nearly as excited by castles at 30 as I was at 12. Still, it was a fun treat to flip through and ruminate that if one wanted to build a castle, it was definitely a plus for it to be on a body of water and in a climate that occasionally snows. Both turn out to be real assets for photographers, and thus probably directly proportional to the clout of the local historical preservation societies.

But what about progress? There are three things that I brought online tonight, as well as a few little improvements here and there. The first is a new picture gallery. Try it here:

http://www.changinggearsmovie.com/Photo/060308/index.html

I'm still working on the gallery layout, but so far I'm happy with just getting the pictures up and having them easily browsable.

The second is the donations page. Melissa and I are working on a pretty thin budget now, and we'll frankly need some help to finish this trip without struggling financially. We want to make this project work and to make a great movie and show out of it, but we also need to pay for the few things we need to cross this country on our bikes. If you would like to help us out, or if you just want to read the longer version of why we need donations, please check out the donations page:

http://www.changinggearsmovie.com/donate.html

Finally, a pair of little movies. We haven't edited together a full episode yet, but here's some footage from our day. The first is the rain this morning (and Melissa looking depressed), then my walk into this community garden:



The garden looked promising, but I was sorely disappointed when I actually entered it. Both videos are just shot on my Canon powershot point-and-click camera, which consistently amazes me with its abilities:

Alright, so we woke not terribly late, around 7:30am, drew the curtains to find it cloudy, with mild rain. Lazily, we muddled around and not before to long the soothing patter turned to a constant downpour. We got to our laptaps, and saw the appropriate forecast for our second day of riding, with three bouts of tornado watches and flash flood warnings, lasting until 2:00pm. I seemed to be unconvinced that this would be too severe to ride, until the loud crack of thunder made me think otherwise. Since it seemed unsafe in terms of our visibility and others, we decided to wait a couple hours and continue to check back with our weather.

In the meantime, getting food was thenext logical option, so we forged ahead and battled the torrential rains in search of breakfast. After getting soaked, though my recent purchase of a wind proof and water resistant proved its worthiness, we sat done for some cold eggs, hashbrowns, yogurt, granola, and mediocre slightly burnt tasting coffee. Yum indeed! As Andy can attest, I have a discernible palette, he would politely say picky, nonetheless:). Satisfying our hunger, we were happy to return to a break in the clouds, even though to our dismay the weather channel on the internet was still discouraging. Begrudgingly, I sided with Andy's decision to cancel the ride for the day and stay in Greencastle.

Now, I don't have a problem with Greencastle, in fact, we're listening to live guitar music at the local coffeeshop with our wifi access, enjoying our little time we do have, however, to be delayed on the 2nd day seemed like we were already resigning to gods. I wanted to bike, test our new trailers, get out of our damp and less then commodious motel room, and experience Moody farms and discuss what Adam Moody expressed as his life mission to have his 250 acre be truly sustainable.

In times like these, as there will be many on this trip, I will refer to our gracious friends at the Bike Garage in Bloomington leaving us with the advice of having patience. Though a little punchy at first, my patience has kicked in...even if the weather ended up being beautiful.

So tomorrow, we will wake early at 6am, and head to Moody Farms and then up to Layafette. Overall, our brief delay allowed us time to get some of the odds and ends done, such as getting more contacts in order, having time to blog, getting the insurance taken care of(still paying lots more then Andy though we have the same health history), get the donation page up, and having time to enjoy the homemade cinnamon icecream.

Finishing up the first day, and my first thought is that I'm tired and I feel a bit burnt. The day was great in many ways. It was the longest ride I've ever been on at around 48 miles. We did it without any crashes or major mechanical problems. We arrived in Greencastle with plenty of time to do our work, even though we started after 9am in Bloomington. We had a great interview with some very exciting students and a thoughtful pair of professors who are trying to change the culture of Depauw and Indiana to be more sustainable. Good stuff.

The trailers also came in, and we assembled and kitted them out tonight. they are packed to the breaking point, but we've got nearly all of our things on board without much problem. It will be interesting to see how much harder it is to pull the trailer's weight than it was to ride without them behind us today. We'll keep you updated.

For now, I've prepared a little photo gallery. This group of photos represents much of what's been going on for me in the last 4 days. The last days at CATS. The Green Drinks/Changing Gears events. Moving out of my apartment and finally the first day on the road. I hope you enjoy the show. Ciao.

Gallery 06/02/08

Day 1 of our journey. Let's see I had an apple, 3 glucose apple cinnamon gels, half of a blueberry muffin, a veggie Subway sandwich, a couple peices of what Andy refers to as the best Pizza ever from Pizza King, lots of water, an Emegenc-C pack. I actually expected to be famished, but gratefully I'm not after the first day of riding 48 miles. Instead i'm mostly exhausted as we've had a lot to do in the last days, having our greendrinks get together, interviews, packing for the trip and also packing Andy's stuff, as he needed to move out of his apartment before he left, figuring out our bike and trailer system, as Andy's parents just a few hours ago graciously dropped them off in Greencastle, getting some things in order for a wedding in October, having my parents in town for the weekend to help out, and on and on. Though tired, i'm elated that we are finally on the road, as the planning of this project has taken over Andy and I's lives; I'm now ready to experience all the interesting, and let me stress interesting points of the journey.

I'm signing off now, only as my eyelids are shutting, but will hopefully give you a better description of our inspiring interview with Depauw University and their new sustainability interns and coordinator. As well, I would like to mention the many random thoughts one has while on a bike for hours.

Go Andy for biking the furthest you've ever biked!

Today we saddle up to ride to Greencastle, Indiana. We don't have our trailers yet and we are packing light, but we're ready to hit the road and get this journey going.

More later, stay tuned.