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Monday, May 24, 2010

Last Chance to St Francis, KS - May 22

Dawn in Last Chance



One month on the road and it's still windy!
We got up at 5 to get some hours in before the winds picked up.  Unfortunately, the winds never really died down but the early morning was beautiful.
We stopped in all the little towns along our route to find most of them pretty much like Last Chance - abandoned.  
As the day wore on, the winds and the temperatures increased and we really needed ice cream but the town of Joe. s had none.  Joes did have a nice thrift store where we talked to the people working there and almost got one of the women to join us on the ride.
Just before 2 we made it to a small cafe in Udalia that served ice cream.  We chatted up the folks eating and working there before handing my bike over to Sean who needed a ride while Catherine and I were pretty much done in by the wind.
Right now we are parked at a funky RV Park charging up batteries and the van.
Parlier today we stopped in the town of Anton and did some small shopping in the only grocery store.  They sold filtered water and when we asked why, the woman working at the store told us that the nitrate level in the water was too high to pass EPA regulations so the water had to be filtered.  So all of the nitrogen based fertilizers that have been dumped on the land over the years have finally poisoned the drinking water.  In predictable human fashion, the woman we talked to only saw the inconvenience of having to filter water as the problem.  The fact that years of toxic agricultural practices caused the problem doesn't seem to register.  What does it take for people to start thinking in terms of systems rather than as merely reactive mammals??
For those of you wanting numbers about energy consumption, stay tuned.  We are collecting data that should satisfy your curiosity and as a teaser, there is huge variability resulting from human pedal power.
Trying to Cope
Destroyed grain storage building- Watermelon sized hail?

Betty Shaw who shares the same birthday as our mother - But she's only 83
Betty gets back to work
Almost got ourselves another Green Rider
Garden art in St. Francis
Looks good enough to eat . . . not!

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