Right now I'm sitting in my tent on the side of Green Valley Rd. outside Folsom, CA at 8am. I am exhausted, frustrated, hungry, my hands are coated in grease and I'm sure I smell terrible. Friday the 13th certainly lived up to its reputation on the road last night.
After a late start -6pm from Sacramento due to a number of gear malfunctions on brand new bikes (including three flats in our hotel.... I think the staff didn't want us to leave) we got rolling towards a campground in Placerville, CA. Fellow rider and trip camera man Jon Filmer even had to replace the whole crank set on his week old Specialized Tricross. By the way, Ride to Sustain has reach a whopping population of three riders, with more set to join in coming weeks.
Anyway, as the crow flies Placerville is only about a 40 mile ride, but even in California bike friendly roads rarely get you anywhere in a hurry. We found a beautiful bike path starting by the University of Sacramento that headed in the right direction, but over the 32 mile course we only covered about 15 useful miles. So we wound up across from Folsom Prison (remember the Johnny Cash song?) lost in the dark with no idea how many miles were left to go.
After flagging down a few passing cars for directions, we found our bearings and put in another half hour before Jon blew out his first tube of the day. It of course was his rear tire and for those of you unfamiliar with dragging a 70lb trailer; having your back tire blow out is a tear-jerking moment, because now you have to unhitch your trailer and remove your bags from your back rack before you can even start replacing your tube.
For an experienced rider this is only about a 5-10 minute process, for Jon who has been biking for a whole three weeks prior to this trip, and doing so in the dark... it's a different story. I think this is a good time to make an appeal for a trip mechanic to join the team as, of the three of us - John, Jon and myself - there is a combined year of cycling experience (I claim 11.5 months of that year). So after we're all saddled up and ready to go, we make it another quarter-mile before Jon blows another one. So the process begins again, and again, and all told six tubes and one tire are replaced, brakes are re-aligned, wheels trued, tools, parts and tempers lost, my night riding light burns out and for a five hour period we average less than one mile per hour.
On the interview side of things: yesterday we departed Sacramento after two days jammed packed with interviews, mostly on green building and urban planning. I have received a lot of questions about living off-grid, so my goal for my time in the state capital was to learn more about where and how you can live with the lowest impact, and the answer I got was a bit of a shock for me. The unequivocal, unanimous answer from three green architects, two developers and a few members of the California State Energy Comission was that off grid living, even in the greenest of homes is less ecologically friendly than high density, urban residences. The reason being that transportation needed to access these often remote buildings offset the green benefits in 99% of cases.
I have a number of great interviews (about 20 of them) I can not wait to post from my time in California so far. I am having some editing issues which will hopefully be sorted out within the week, so check back soon and I'll have the videos linked up.
Note: Interview/itinerary suggestions for the trip can be emailed to me.
| Ride To Sustain will pass through the following cities: San Francisco, CA – Sacramento, CA – Reno, NV – Salt Lake City, UT – Denver, CO – Omaha, NB – Des Moines, IA – Chicago, IL – Detroit, MI – Cleveland, OH – Pittsburgh, PA – Washington, DC – Philadelphia, PA – New York City, NY – Hartford, CT – Boston, MA |
