Yesterday’s Sustainability launch at BU was a resounding success! In addition to signing up over 450 students for Carbon Rally, the Dean of Students, Kenneth Elmore, took the Hauler for a spin around campus, much to the delight of onlooking students!

Check out the full story
http://www.bu.edu/today/

Hi all

Please join me today from 1-4pm at Boston University George Sherman Union ( GSU ) to see the Hauler in action and sign up for sustainability challenges and events at Boston University surrounding the launch of their new web portal dedicated to sustainability issues at BU, here are some more details

Sustainable student organizations – all of them have been invited.
Carbonrally – they will be signing people up for “Join the Challenge”
Save-That-Stuff – will talk about how recycling gets done
ZipCar – they will be giving $25 worth of ZipCar time for faculty, staff, and students who sign up for ZipCar.
Solar Road Trip http://solarroadtrip.com/
Bring your own mug – 50 cent discounts all day

Join the Challenge:
A central element of the website is “Join the Challenge” with Carbonrally to raise awareness and engagement around sustainability. Please sign up for Carbonrally at your earliest convenience. http://www.carbonrally.com/leagues/boston-university You can do this now. We are still looking for many Team Leaders, please send us your suggestions if you haven’t already.

We will be handing out reusable stainless steel mugs to the first 500 people to sign up for the Challenge at the link. Anyone who signs up before midnight January 28th will have a chance to win a new Trek mountain bike provided in part by Landry’s Bicycles. The school or college with the highest participation in the Challenge by the end of February will receive a bean burrito party. Why Bean Burritos? … Look at the poster attached.

OK, I have a few weeks to fill in, and some freezing stories to relate, but I am safely back in Boston after getting trapped on the wrong side of a river in Norristown, PA after discovering that the Hauler can not cross a foot bridge.

More school visits to come, still have a few books left to give away! Keep posted for Hauler in the City pictures, coming soon!

On the road as much as I have recently been, getting off course or just plain lost is not unusual and is for the most part, part of the daily routine. Not a day goes by without some sort of missed turn, misread map, or misplaced GPS waypoint. I would therefore consider myself well versed and well practiced at the art of asking strangers for directions, the proper execution of which can be considered an art form by those willing to put down the map for a second and consult a passerby. Now there are two types of marks, those who are local and know the area like their own backyard and those who are fellow tourists and are just as clueless as yourself. It is preferable to avoid asking the latter type, as this just wastes your time and increases your frustration. I have learned to spot outsiders and steer clear of making eye contact with them at intersection. Locals, on the other hand, are usually a good source of information, which brings me to an interesting phenomenon. Why is it, that when you ask for directions, 99% of the time the scenario goes something like this:

“Excuse me please, I seem to be a little bit lost, I’m looking ( pulls out map, points to map with finger ) for Route 123, which is also called ABC Road?

Now, you would think that it would be obvious that the act of asking for directions would indicate that the you are an out-of-towner, hence the fact that you are ASKING FOR DIRECTIONS!

But somehow, 9 out of 10 locals asked will provide you with an answer that goes something like this.

“Oh, route 123, sure that’s right over there, but that’s not the best way to go, wait, where did you say you were going? Oh, well in that case, it’s just up the street, first right after vet and if you pass Doc Brown’s farm you’ve gone to far.”

At this point, invariably someone else who just happens to be listening jumps in with advice which completely contradicts the first person and offers a better, easier, more direct option in order to further your confusion.

“No, no no, that will just confuse him ( thank you, already there) and he’ll wind up over by the old fairgrounds and that road ain’t paved. What you want to do is turn around and go back the way you came until you get to Bullock’s corner, well we call it that ‘cuz that’s where the accident was a few years back, well in any case, as soon as you hit Bullock’s corner take a left on the first road towards the high school and then keep straight in the direction of the lake…………”

Um, I don’t mean to be rude, because I value your time and appreciate your advice but…….

I DON’T LIVE HERE, WHY ON EARTH WOULD I KNOW THESE THINGS? The Lake, the Vet, the High School, these are obvious to you, but I’M NOT FROM HERE!!!!!!

Go out and try this yourself, 99% of the directions you will get are based on perspective of a life long resident of the surrounding area. and NOT on the perspective of a clueless out of town tourist.

That is why good directions, direction givers AND direction takers, are a blessed, sacred thing. So next time someone asks you where something is, don’t tell them how YOU would get there, think about it and let them know the best way THEY should go.

With a motor being shipped I took advantage of a down day and shot up to St. Louis to see if they were still bitter about the Red Sox a few years back, turns out no, which is a good thing, since my Fenway hat was all that kept me discernible from the other rag tag disheveled looking tourists, lurking around National Parks. Had the finest meal I’d enjoyed in ages, company included, and took in the sites and sounds of a vibrant city which reminds me a bit of Boston, not too shabby!

Huge shout to Stephanie Carson who took this fantastic picture of the worlds largest McDonalds in the background, they have yet to paint the arch yellow, its still being built!

Preface:
NO ACTUAL RABBITS were injured in the filming of this video. In fact, stunt-rabbits were used. It is uncanny how a large rat with paper ears glued to its head will appear as a cute fluffy bunny, even on HD video. Rats, on the other hand…………

Ah, I love the smell of fresh Milo in the morning. Jimmy was trusting enough to let me actually DRIVE the Combine after a few words of advice and as you will see, increasing reservation as I kept swerving to hit rabbits and left messy harvest lines and skips all over the field!

Just as things were getting head-windy and bleak mid -afternoon on Tues, my dad calls from ahead and tells me wonderful news. Friends of his, the Bontragers, whom he met in the Grand Canyon have just emailed him that our bike route runs right through the middle of their farm, and have invited us for dinner and to stay overnight. We have been camping roadside the past week, and this invitation comes just in time to keep me from going Great Plains Postal due to lack of anything close to home comfort.

Jimmy and Terry meet us outside of town that evening and take turns spinning the Hauler in the high school parking lot, then invite us back for dinner at the farm. Both have families, love farming and love Kansas. These are the type of folks that make up the backbone our country, they work hard, they grow our food on land that has been farmed in the family for generations, they teach the right values to their children, and they welcome in guests with great hospitality.

Well the next morning I was in for a education of a lifetime. Jimmy came by around 9 in the morning and asks if I’d ever ridden in a combine. Now I must admit, despite the fact that we have a “farm” in New Hampshire, I’m more of the City Mouse than the Country Mouse, so this was a first! Turns out that we were there at peak harvest time and the Milo (Sorghum) was waiting to be cut. From the barn, we climbed up the 3 steps to the cabin of a red 1974 Ford grain truck, and rambled off into the middle of an endless plain towards a dark spot that eventually became an enormous green John Deere combine. As a kid I’d worked on Sal Hannah’s farm in Franconia, NH, picking corn, weeding etc, and thought that was a pretty big spread, so when the scale of everything dawned on me, the sheer magnitude of he work required to tend to such vast acres of grain, I felt overwhelmed and in awe of those who do this, every day, for a living. THIS is where food comes from!

Well I won’t bore you with all the minutia of the combine ride, since I’ll post a few videos of that for anyone interested. The videos are, by my own admission, amateur but wikkid informative. Jimmy explains how everything works and an awful lot about modern commercial farming, (we also run over a number of rabbits). Before I sign off, however, I need to make one last point. After reading Michael Pollan’s recent books, I have frowned upon of large-scale operations, relying on huge amounts of chemical inputs in order to produce yields that are commercially viable. Farming is just as industrial now as any other manufacturing process. It has been forced into this, based on the agendas of big business, dictated through policies and politics. According to Jimmy, many legacy farmers in this area, America’s breadbasket, regret this industrial scenario but have no choice but to play along with the new rules or get out the game entirely. Patented seeds must be purchased each for each new crop, even if that crop produces enough seed for the next year, or the farmers face huge government enforced fines. Local trade and sale of foodstuffs is regulated, limited, and restricted. The USDA must inspect and approve everything, preventing even the most logical elements of local barter. It is a shame, but this is reality. It’s fine to imagine a country full of small, Jeffersonian farms, but our current system is not set up that way, so we have to change the system first, not the other way around. Until then, your tofu is no better than a McDonald’s hamburger.

Good Morning Kansas

The nice thing about starting with mountains, is the flats taste better. The flats taste FANTASTIC. From the early snow fall last week in CO making me whimper and curse my late start, to the beakdown and delayed repair, things were looking bleaker than the photos I posted of the plains….until the weather broke. Yesterday and today were sunny, not JUST sunny, but WARM and sunny. Nov 1-2, and we had 70 degrees and not a cloud, a bit of wind to be sure, but who cares, its behind me. In any case, with the help of Pedro, my ever patient father, the team advanced a record 200 miles in less than 36 hours, and were rewarded with this spectacular Turner-esque display as the sun sank behind us….

Ummm, how can I put this delicately? I CAN’T. An open window road trip through the plains of KS will make you a local food, grass fed cow DEVOTEE quicker than I can say E.Coli. Feed lot after feed lot, REEKING of cow poop and urine, are what make up the scenery here are we pass from one grain elevator to the next. There is miles and miles of open pasture land as far as the eye can see, yet 1000’s of cows are penned up in corn feed lots on the side of highway 96, laying in their own filth, EATING their own filth, and COVERED in their own filth. Now with pigs, hey, tha’ts par for the course, we all remember Pulp Fiction, “The Pig is a filthy animal”. Well old Bessie, or at least piece of old Bessie (Micky-Ds Dollar menu) is sitting here on the side of the road, cramped in a pen full of other miserable looking cows, wallowing in a substance that can be smelled for miles and is not of the floral variety. No wonder they shoot them all up with antibiotics, without them they would be goners. Beef and fecal matter should not even be in the same sentence together, let alone in close physical proximity. This is worse than 18th century London.

Pictures will be posted as soon as I can summon the courage to get close to one of these ‘cow-stys’ enough to use my camera.

A few images later I swear you will be shelling out extra for happy grass fed, no fecal (feed) lot imprisoned bovines.

If EVER there was a compelling reason to support your local organic farmer and shy away from the industrial end of the food chain, THIS IS IT!

It was nice of someone to put the mountains behind the banner, great prop department this town has!!!!