Day 6: Take me to the candy shop (Yuba City to Chico)

I woke up before Rachel and slipped inside. Ashley poked up from the couch and Josh emerged from his nightrobe; I felt a little like St. Nick popping down a chimney to kids waiting under the Christmas tree. We held a pre-breakfast science lesson with the Sol Cycles. Ashley named the purple one Sunny, appropriately, and she had the bicycle moving in the weak 8 am light. She and her brothers are being homeschooled, so her assignment for the morning was to write an essay on it. Awesome! (Ashley, if you’re reading, we’d love to see it!)

After breakfast burritos, we rode out with Rick, their grandfather. He took us up Larkin road and talked a little about “world’s smallest mountain range,” the Sutter Buttes.

In Live Oak, we found Penny Candy. Sugar sugar sugar sugar baby.

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Eventually we made it sixty miles to Sierra Nevada, the first in our brewery tour of America. Rachel conducted a solubility experiment, for science of course, comparing nitro and CO2 stouts (see right).

Big burgers, two tasters laster, we wandered over to the store to see if they had bike jerseys (they didn’t) and ran into their Earth Day celebration. They were showing “The Little Things,” a documentary about some environmentally-conscious? snowboarders. I can’t say I’d recommend it. There were a couple of stories that spoke to innovative ways to alter lifestyles and positively impact the earth, but mostly it felt like the director shopped around to a bunch of his/her friends and asked if they knew anyone doing something along Earth Day lines. Like there were a lot of "tiny house" examples. Eh, it was a free movie and there was free popcorn.

We hung out at the Naked Coffee Lounge for a while, propped our legs up on the tables and bit into the internet.

Our couchsurfing host, Raymahh, returned from Muay Thai class around 10:30; she had the whole set up going: mattresses and couches for us in the living room, which we took advantage of fast.

Preparation

Hey friends!

Rachel and I are going to try to post as much as possible on here. I’ll be writing more of the daily doses, but we’re both going to be chiming in, posting photos, etc. We’ve got a few lined up before we go into the Sierra Nevadas, since we’re not sure when we’ll have service again. Hope you enjoy!

We’ve been slowly collecting our gear since January but during the last three weeks, Rachel and I must’ve made 25 trips to REI (not to mention local bike shops, grocery stores, and pharmacies). I listed and weighed all the stuff I’m bringing with me (note the items that have already been crossed out and thus sent back with my mother (thanks mom!)).

Check it out here

Rachel’s carrying other essentials, like first aid.

Check out our Sol Cycle tool box! Fits snug on the back rack of my bike.

Here’s how I’ve got things stacked:

4 panniers, all Arkel Orca’s. I got those instead of the traditional Ortliebs because they have pockets on the front. Plus with patches gorilla glued on the front, they look primo.

I can’t keep anything straight, so I sorted my bags and wrote what I put in them on the neon visibility tape I ran down the outside of the panniers. Roughly, the front packs have food + hammock (food for the body, food for the soul) on one side and bike and camera gear on the other. I’ve got Surly Nice front and back racks, a ton of surface area on the top, so I strapped my Voltaic solar panel to the top with a couple’a bungee cords. The front panniers sit nicely loaded lower down on the bottom rungs.

On the back, I have clothes + electronics in a third bag, and the miscellaneous camping gear in the fourth. The book I brought? Desert Solitaire, by Edward Abbey. Here’s a quote that’s a bit of a mantra for me for the trip. In context, he’s out in his trailer in the Utah desert, miles from any other human.

“.. but instead of loneliness I feel loveliness. Loveliness and a quiet exultation.”

As I finish books, I’m shipping them back home and either finding a new one where I am, or having my mom ship me one from a box of good reads I prepared before I left. I didn’t bring a Kindle because Iike the brush of the paper turning the page, and because I associate the knowledge gained with the places I’ll be when I read them, and I want to be able to go straight back to that.

Yeahhhh I’ve got a ton of stuff. There’s always a trade-off between weight and comfort, and since we’ll be on the road for three months, I’m learning to love the little things: a couple extra pounds is worth it.

Other things I did to prepare: road my bike most days in the two weeks before leaving; road it once fully loaded; got it properly fitted at Bicycle Outfitters in Los Altos; did some squats, lunges and deadlifts at the gym; spent time with friends and family; started packing for grad school.

Leaving home is always hard for me. I’m a homebody, and I crave the warmth and sense of belonging that’s hard to find outside the house I grew up in. I just found out that, with Cornell starting in late August, once we finish this adventure, I’ll only have a few weeks at home before I have to pick up and drive back across the country to New York.

That’s tough.

Here’s to finding another home on the road.

-Elizabeth

We did it!!!

Thank you so much. With the help of over 100 supporters, we successfully raised enough money to make the Sol Cycle a reality!

The Indiegogo campaign raised over $7500, which will allow us to leave/ship at least two Sol cycles to each classroom we stop at, with wiggle room for more if we can bring the costs down. Now the hard part... making the Sol Cycle roll... and biking it to classrooms across the nation.

BLAST OFF!

Breaking news from the murky corner of a Sacramento coffee shop: we just launched our Indiegogo campaign for Cycle for Science!!! After three mostly sleepless nights of spastic typing and video editing, we’ve finalized our goals and the campaign is live.

As a recap – in exactly two months, Elizabeth and I are bicycling from San Francisco to New York City. As we zoomzoom across the US, we’ll be stopping in middle school classrooms to teach science lessons and to interview science educators. We’re designing the “Sol Cycle” – a 3d printable, solar powered bicycle demo – to teach about renewable energy and physics, and to make our project possible we need some help covering the costs to print this and to document teacher’s stories.

Check out our full campaign here!

We also did our third teacher interview today! Sneak peak: this amazingly driven woman saw a need, and single-handedly started robotics and programming electives at her middle school! Stay posted for upcoming blog posts about her and the inspiring teachers we’ve spoken to so far.