Bikes Not Bombs Presentation Wrap-Up

We had a wonderful presentation at Bikes Not Bombs world headquarters last night! We managed to fill the room and use up every spare chair they had available. It was wonderful to meet some readers who have been following us from the very beginning of our trip up to now. It was also great that so many people that had attended had never been to Bikes Not Bombs before. Here are some snaps from last night.

Rolling up into BNB HQ.

The quiet before the storm.

Workstands and parts used by the youth programs. BNB has been one of the most organized bicycle non-profits we’ve ever seen!

Youth program leaders debrief after taking some kids out on the street.

Time to set up the chairs.

The room started to fill up quickly.

Mohammed and Abdul, two youth educators, helped out with the raffle tickets for some awesome giveaways.

The Bikes Not Bombs staff that was on hand at the event. Thanks guys!

It was a crowded house with about 65 attendees making for a great lively discussion.

Some lucky attendees got some snazzy new Klean Kanteens for their bikes.

We got to meet some of our longtime readers. This is Laura with Bill, who made a two hour drive from Cape Cod to see us. He’s about to embark on his own cross-country bicycle tour in a few months.

For us, the best part of the presentation is the one-on-one discussions afterwards. It is really humbling and heartwarming to hear from people who have been inspired by our journey to take their own. I don’t think Laura and I had any inkling about what our simple bike ride would morph into after all these months. You don’t get the sense you’re reaching as many people as you are when you’re writing a blog post at a campsite in the middle of nowhere.

Thank you to everyone who attended last night or any of our other events and presentations. If reading our site or attending one of our presentations has inspired to hit the road, we’d love to hear from you via email or in the comments!

Our 2011 Calendar – “A Year Without Keys”

A year without keys, means a year without locks. I’ve been photographing our journey for the last 15 months and I’ve always tried to keep that sense of freedom and adventure in mind. It was a tough job scrolling through literally thousands and thousands of photos to put together this years calendar. I tried to pick photos that I thought would inspire others to get on their bike and travel.

So pick up a copy for the office or as a gift for your bikey partner/friend. Sales will help us with our next adventure that we’re planning now!

Events this Week!

We’ve got some great events we’re doing this week while in Boston. On Wednesday, we’re doing a call-in phone interview with Elise Giddings of Cycle9. We met her on our way to Durham, NC. She has a great shop that specializes in e-bikes and cargo bikes and is active with promoting transportation cycling in the Carborro area. She can be often be seen zipping around town in a Madsen, an unlikely site in North Carolina. To join us on the conference call, sign up here. The call is on Wednesday, Oct 27th, 9PM eastern (8pm central, 7pm mountain, 6pm pacific).

We’re also doing a presentation in Boston at BikesNotBombs HQ! The Facebook Event page is here, please RSVP so we can get a rough headcount. This will be our final presentation before we take a train to Portland, OR.

And speaking of Portland, we’re really looking forward to diving into all the bikeyness in PDX. We’re already planning a presentation there and will also do some overnight bike camping trips. So stay tuned!

Headbadges Across America

As we’ve been traveling, we’ve also been continuing to work. I’ve discovered that making jewelry on the road is more difficult than I imagined, but making headbadges fits in beautifully and is always a fun project for me. What do I love most about making headbadges? The fact that each one is always entirely different and the way that I am continually impressed with the creative ideas that people dream up when requesting a custom badge.

What’s a headbadge? It’s sort of like a hood ornament for a bicycle. It’s usually on your bike’s head tube (hence the name), so that you see it when you look at the very front of the bike. Most modern bikes either don’t come with a headbadge or come with a simple decal of the maker’s logo. I make custom badges so that you can make your bike stand out!

Since they’ve been such a great project for our traveling schedule, I’ve been effectively making headbadges across America! And we thought it’d be great fun to show off some of the creative ideas that I’ve been commissioned to make out of metal.

If you’re interested in your own custom headbadge, drop me an email. (Hint, hint: Custom headbadges make great gifts for birthdays and the upcoming holidays!)

Our Winter Plans

Neither of us can quite believe that winter is upon us, yet again. We had so much hot and humid weather for so long – and, then, sometime in the last few weeks, summer disappeared and the air was suddenly crisp. We’ve been enjoying fall in the northeast, with its technicolor autumn leaves, and now we’re trying to prepare ourselves for winter.

This winter will be different from last winter. Last year, we camped our way through two months of sub-freezing temperatures in the southwest, gung-ho to prove to ourselves that we could be “hard-core” travelers. This year, we’re headed to Portland, Oregon, to work and rest and plan the next leg of our cycling journey.

Yes, you read that right… we’re planning to pause our travels for a couple months. We’re trying to wrap our minds around this idea, that we won’t be moving continually and seeing new places regularly. After nearly 15 months on the road, this is a very strange idea for us. Yet, we’ve also started to recognize that we’re tired. It turns out that long-term travel can be as exhausting as it is exciting. So, we’re looking at this winter as a way to recharge and keep ourselves from accidentally burning out, while we decide where in the world we want to pedal next.

What’s next?

We’ll be using our time in Portland to work on a number of projects that we haven’t quite found the time to do while we travel. A 2011 calendar is in the works, and we’ll be putting together a series of photo and story books (actual printed versions). Russ will be editing hours of video footage, and I’ll be piecing together new jewelry. We’ll also be planning our next adventure (and have already been kicking around a few ideas)… A year exploring Spain? A ramble through SE Asia? A fly-fishing bike adventure in Argentina? Trade in our LHTs for Bromptons?

What about the blog?

We will still update the blog and Facebook page, continuing to document this portion of our journey. Many travel blogs end once a trip is over, never discussing the lessons learned and the strange transition that occurs between travel and “normal” life. Just as we documented the process of getting rid of our stuff last summer, we think sharing the story of how to re-assimilate is just as interesting. Not to mention that we have a multitude of stories rolling around in our heads that haven’t made it on this site yet. And, since we’re planning to hit the road again, we’re certainly not done here!

Want to hire us?

Since our goal is to work while we take our winter break, we also want to let everyone know that we’ll be available for hire! If you want some amazing photos and you’re in the Portland area, LA area, or easily accessible by public transit, contact Russ. If you’re looking for some one-of-a-kind jewelry or bicycle headbadges, contact Laura.

Want some roommates?

Shortly after our presentation in Boston, we’ll be hopping aboard Amtrak and taking it all the way to Portland. We’re hoping to spend approximately four months in town, so we’re on the hunt for a place to live. If you know anyone in search of temporary roommates, or someone who’s looking for a housesitter or to sublet their place for a few months, please let us know. We’re hoping to keep expenses to a minimum, so that we can save up quicker for our next adventure. And we’re hoping to figure out these details in the next few days, so that we can start planning for our trip back to Oregon.

When we get past the oddity of living in one place for a couple months, we’re actually kind of excited to be in Portland this winter, and have plenty of time to explore the city and its cycling culture (and beer and arts cultures too!).

Thanks everyone!

Bike Friendly New Haven

New Haven is probably more associated with the venerable Yale University than it is with cycling (though, as some residents like to proudly point out, the first chain driven bicycle was invented in New Haven!). Yet, during our stay we found the seeds of a growing bike community.

We stayed with a long time reader and her car-lite family. The proud owner of the first Bakfiets (purchased from CleverCycles) and Xtracycle in New Haven, Sara and Peter drop their kids off at school via cargo bike every morning and bring them back home every afternoon. When we first arrived in New Haven, we were sitting on their front porch waiting for them to get home. It was quite a sight to see them coming down the street!

Their simple act of bike commuting has raised awareness of families on bikes and of cargo bikes in New Haven. Sara has noticed a few more Xtracycles and an increase in commuting cyclists around town since they first moved there.

While in town, we also stopped by The Devil’s Gear Bicycle Shop. The somewhat controversial name of the shop refers to Sean Kelly, a pro rider whose stunning performances were derided by journalist, accusing him of using the “devil’s gear.” Though the shop was named after a racer, its selection is far more eclectic. Outside the shop was a Civia Xtracycle and inside they have a good selection of commuting bikes and gear. Matthew, the owner of Devil’s Gear, started the shop ten years ago. At the time, he was working for a bike shop where his colleagues would mock him for riding his bike to work. Matthew gave his two weeks and opened up his own shop that would foster commuters, give repair classes and lead rides. The old shop he worked at has since closed and the Devil’s Gear remains.

On our last day in New Haven, I accompanied Sara to Bike to Work Day. Unlike most cities, New Haven has a monthly Bike to Work Day. Put on by Elm City Cycling, the local bike advocacy group, they offer commuting cyclists coffee and breakfast snacks in front of city hall. That morning was chilly and overcast, the remnants of the Nor’easter from the night before and the prospects of commuting cyclists looked grim.

Despite the less than ideal weather, bike commuters did arrive and many volunteers hung around to show their support. Some, even broke out into song!

New Haven still has a long way to go from being a cycling Mecca. They recently had sharrows painted on some of their streets, causing a bit of confusion to unsuspecting motorists. However, with its relative denseness, flatness, multitude of roads and a college full of smart people (c’mon Yale!) – it has the beginnings of being a great cycling town.

Join us in Boston!

We’re currently in Providence but will be in Boston in a few days. The fine folks at BikesNotBombs are helping us set up a presentation! It will be our last one for this journey before we winter in Portland. If you’re in the area we hope you’ll join us!

Please RSVP at our Facebook Event page so we know how many people will attend.

Discovering Family

It turns out that my great-uncle Herman rode a bicycle too. “All over New Jersey,” I’m told.

When my great-grandfather emigrated from Germany to start a new life in America, he literally jumped off his merchant marine ship in New York harbor and swam ashore.

In many ways, this bicycle trip has been a journey of discovery. For me, there has also been the discovery of family, of people with whom I share a mysterious history, of roots which partially explain why I am what I am.

Meeting cousins doesn’t sound particularly dramatic, unless you know that this is entirely new to me. I grew up in Oregon while most of my relatives lived on the east coast, so the idea of extended family is foreign to me. A school project many years ago had me researching my family history and drawing a family tree – and, with only a few exceptions, this was the extent of my connection to relatives.

Until we found ourselves on the east coast, and these names from a school project suddenly became actual people with whom I was drinking beers.

If you have never met relatives that you don’t know, trust me when I say that it is an odd and emotionally-charged experience. It’s just like meeting anyone else that you don’t know, except that you feel like you should know them. You search faces and words for some sense of connection, some feeling of relation, some understanding of what it’s like to be a part of a big family. You try to not feel like you missed out on something as a kid, and try to not make one simple bbq mean the entire world. It’s like stepping inside a huge jigsaw puzzle of stories that are hard to piece together. A million questions flood to the surface, but feel strangely inappropriate to ask – I want to know what happened fifty years ago between my grandparents, but shouldn’t I already know this story?

We spend a few days with my cousin in New Jersey, sharing stories and photos. I am so thrilled to make this connection, to get to know this woman, to start to feel like a part of a larger whole. Russ laughs and says that he can tell we’re related because we both talk a lot and we seem to look at the world in the same way. It’s strange to hear that you have mannerisms in common with someone you hardly know, and yet it’s also comforting beyond words.

It turns out that there is mystery and drama in my family history, and some of it reads like an incredible novel. I can’t help but wonder what to do with all of these stories that I am learning; I want to make sure they don’t get lost again.

There is a house in Princeton, New Jersey that my grandfather built, and in which he lived with my grandmother before being stationed in Turkey. I never knew about this place or that they had been happy once, but I have heard the stories of my grandmother seeing Einstein walking around campus, as if he was just anyone else. The pieces of the puzzle are slowly starting to make sense.

My great-grandparents are buried outside of New Brunswick, New Jersey, and we stumble into the cemetery on a gray day. I have never met these people and I’m not sure what to feel when I stand at their grave. All I know is what I have just learned, that they were the heads of the American side of this family, that they were migrant farm workers at one point.

I have finally come to understand the lingo that designates someone a “first cousin, once-removed,” but I am still learning what it means to actually know such a person. It’s a daunting task to learn all of this now, from scratch, instead of gently growing up with it all. But I feel fortunate to be able to learn it at all, to look at this family tree I have recently been gifted and watch it come to life, to see traits in these people that I also find in myself, to become anchored in such a rich history.

Of Presentations and E-Books

When we started this trip, we really didn’t have a “mission” in mind. We weren’t riding for a charity or a cause. We wanted to ride because we wanted to explore the United States. Over the course of the trip, however, we found that bicycle travel was a truly liberating experience that hardly anybody tried. People ride their bikes fast down the road or on a trail in the mountains, but bicycle travel is not actively encouraged by the bike industry (with few exceptions).

The more we traveled, the more we found that we had a unique opportunity to really inspire people to get on their bikes and explore. This website and our Facebook fan page have been great tools to share our experience, but we wanted to go a step further, so we started doing presentations. The presentations let us directly answer questions about bike touring and also provide a great way to meet up with our readers!

And yet, getting people excited about touring through the site and presentations isn’t always enough. So we hatched this idea in Austin to actually take folks on an overnight trip with us, to REALLY show people how great bicycle travel can be. And then we led a second one in Durham (thanks Jack!). Everyone that has joined us on one of our overnight bike trips has had an “Aha!” moment, as in “Aha! Why didn’t I do this before?”

If you can’t attend a presentation or join us on an S24O, but you have specific gear questions, Panniers & Peanut Butter is the next best thing. We hope after you read it, you feel prepared and inspired to hit the road on your own!

Panniers & Peanut Butter has been out for less than a month and has already been a great hit. Thanks to all of our wonderful readers and supporters who have already bought a copy! Also, a big thanks to EcoVelo, LetsGoRideABike, BikeCommuters, RocBike and CarFreeAmerican for posting about the release.

CarFreeAmerican recently posted a review of the book. Here’s an excerpt:

Whether you are an arm chair adventurer, a S24O tourist(get the book to find out what this means), a multi day bicycle tourist, or an adventure cyclist, you will, I promise, love this book.

Laura and Russ take turns with the writing which gives this book the rich uniqueness of feeling like you are sitting across a picnic table from them. They keep it simple, only sharing information about the equipment they are using, how it works for them, and what they like best.

They added some information I have never seen in other books about bicycle touring. A section on their Porch, fun. A surprisingly fascinating section on tying knots with a link to videos on how to tie knots, off beat and extremely helpful. The Office, answers the question what equipment is needed to document the tour while on it.

If you’re curious about bike touring and want to learn what has worked for us over the last 14 months, get a copy of Panniers & Peanut Butter. It’s 75 pages, full of tips, reviews and photos (about 30 megabytes, so download it somewhere with a good signal). Of course, we’re also happy to answer any questions you have via email (as long as we’re not in the middle of nowhere).

We have one more presentation in the works for Boston at the end of October (more details forthcoming). After that, we’re going to take a few months in Portland (Oregon) to work and figure out where we’ll tour next! (And, hopefully, release a few more books!)

Minimalism on a Bicycle

Nearly fifteen months ago, we turned the lamp off in our apartment for the last time, left the keys on the counter, and pedaled away. We had slept in the living room on that last night because the apartment was empty and it was kind of spooky to sleep all the way back in the bedroom. After many months of dreaming about this trip and an extremely harried six weeks of moving everything out as quickly as possible, we were finally on our way. A long time has passed since we left our previous lives, enough time to forget what it was truly like, but we haven’t forgotten the experience of making that intentional change to living the way we are now.

Over these past many months, we have been extremely fortunate to be able to stay with dozens of generous and kind people across the US. All sorts of folks with different backgrounds and different living situations. And each time we step into a home, we find ourselves comparing this place where we will stay the night to some nebulous idea of a future home-of-our-own. ‘Could we live in this type of place?’ we wonder. After all the effort to get rid of everything many months ago, it is strange to even wonder about settling into an apartment again. We shudder at the idea of again accumulating all the accoutrements: lease, utilities, pots and pans, towels, furniture. It all feels so unbelievably foreign and burdensome.

Yet, we have also discovered that the urge to “have” does not go away. I do not want to buy more things and haul them around with me on my bicycle. But I also have a love of reading that can easily manifest itself into three paperback books at a time, each of them tumbling around in my pannier. And I cannot express how much I truly and deeply miss having a refrigerator and an oven and sleeping on an actual mattress. We ride through towns with a a great bike culture and we long for lighter-weight bicycles of our own, perfect for bombing through city streets. We laugh about how we did not reach that level of minimalist nirvana, of rising completely above the desire for stuff. Rather, like other cycle tourists we know, we have become mildly obsessed with our stuff, knowing that we have to carry each individual thing, so it all needs to work really well and serve an extremely useful function.

There are a lot of ideas milling around on the internet about how to achieve minimalism. Many of them fall into the “count your things” category. I recently stumbled onto the 333 Fashion Project, in which you cull your wardrobe down to just 33 items and wear only those pieces for 3 entire months. It’s a fascinating idea, and I love to see folks rally behind a project that will help them think more critically and live more mindfully. I also chuckle a little bit because I’ve been living my own 15-15 Project:15 items of clothing for 15 months. Of course, it’s not a contest, but it does give me pause. Do we need something bigger than ourselves to tell us when enough is enough?

Ironically, neither of us were self-defined minimalists before this trip. We had so much stuff spread all over our way-too-big apartment. Every attempt to cull a few things just ended up in frustration and resignation. Now, though, as we begin to think about slowing our momentum and staying in one place for the winter, we realize how nervous we are about the possibility of collecting stuff again. I think about the things that we might find ourselves wanting and needing over the winter – sheets, towels, blankets, u-locks, a better rain jacket – and I cringe at the idea of purchasing and owning all these items, finding a place to put them when “at home,” and getting rid of them all again when we hop back on the bikes. All of this has made us realize that minimalism isn’t about the actual stuff you own (how much or how little), but about your relationship to that stuff (your thought process upon purchase and awareness of its impact on your life-at-large). And it’s also not something we can just check off a to-do list, it’s something that we have to continually think about and work on, even when everything you own has to fit on a bicycle.