Pedaling for Peace

On April 15, 2012 I started riding my bicycle cross-country from Jacksonville, Florida in voluntary support of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation (NAPF) and the work of author and Peace Leadership Director for the NAPF, Paul K. Chappell. By July 4th, I had covered over 1300 miles to just west of Luling, Texas where a major mechanical failure brought this first stage of my cross-country journey to an end. After storing my bicycle and trailer with my aunt and uncle in Weatherford, Texas, I flew from Dallas to Santa Barbara, California to attend the NAPF First Annual Peace Leadership Summer Workshop. I then lived and worked in Santa Barbara for several more months before I returned to Jacksonville and sold off the rest of my possessions that I could to help fund a continuation of my journey. Starting June 8, 2013 and ending August 9, 2013, I rode from Weatherford, through 400 miles of the central Texas hill country, including Austin, Texas, back to Luling. It was at this point that a friend of mine invited me to work for a brief period in Pennsylvania before flying me back to Santa Barbara where I continued volunteering for the NAPF as well as for the Santa Barbara Bike Coalition. As of August 9th, 2014 I began"Stage III" of my cross-country adventure, this time heading south from Santa Barbara to San Diego and then east to El Paso, TX. It was there that illness, winter weather, and diminishing resources brought that leg of my journey to an end. After staying with another friend in Columbus, GA for several months, I moved "back home" to Kentucky to stay with my dad for a while and build a better "resource base" for future endeavors including review and further tracking and primitive survival skills training at Tom Brown, Jr's Tracker School , and a possible longer tour of the east coast, northern tier, and north west coast back down to Santa Barbara, CA.


Monday, March 11, 2013

Update from Florida

Talk about "Turtle Power"!

While still recovering from a pretty bad upper-respiratory infection, it was a struggle today and yesterday to get some items up on E-bay and Craig's List. Because I am making sure a portion of my sales from E-bay go to the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, I have to go through a more convoluted route to get a post completed. It's pretty annoying, but I have persevered and have several items listed now with more to come.

If you would like to support my trip with a bid/purchase, you can find my E-bay listings here.

I will be at the local Flea Market this Wednesday, and will probably do yard sales on the weekends. More sorting, E-baying etc., during the week. Looking back at some old photos of my stuff in houses where I have stayed and now in my storage unit, it is just hard for me to believe, even after everything I have already gotten rid of, there is Still More Stuff! It really is amazing what we can accumulate in a lifetime!

But, I am going to continue to persevere. Again, I know what I'm working for. I know what I have to look forward to, and so I just have to stay focused.

In the mean time, there have been some interesting things happening on-line regarding the sequester, military spending, etc. Here are links to some of the articles and references I've been reading:

For America's Military: Less Nukes

It's Not You, It's Me: America's nukes are designed to comfort us, not scare the enemy

50 Facts about U.S. Nuclear Weapons

The Most Expensive Weapon Ever Built

Cost of War: Tradeoffs (Calculator)

CostsofWar.Org

On another tangent, I found this TED talk after it was recommended to me by someone I met at a Starbucks in Santa Barbara: Bonnie Bassler: How bacteria "talk". I'm looking forward to seeing where this research goes in part because these bacteria can migrate from person to person. I wonder how much they "talk" to each other while using us as the vehicle of that "communication"?

So, staying busy, trying to stay updated on what's going on out there in the world, and continuing to do my part to make it a better place!