Month: February 2022

Exploring Dallas

2/15/22

What a great day! The weather may turn tomorrow (actually, I think I may hear a thunderstorm outside even now, as I type) but today, while windier than I would have liked, was sunny and 70-ish.

The day started when my Warmshowers host Brandon gave me a short walking tour of his neighborhood this morning. We saw some large and historic houses.

Then he biked off to his volunteer gig at Bike Friendly South Dallas WeCycle Center, while I biked over to the west side of town to meet my friends Ali and Ty, of A Matter of Impact. We had initially met via Instagram, probably about a year ago, and had the chance to do a Zoom at one point while I was still in Portland. I remembered that they lived in Dallas, so I was excited to meet them here.

We had a wonderful lunch at a Tex-Mex place, including a dish I had never heard of but which is apparently commonplace here: “table guacamole”! I wish I had thought to take a photo before the server left us with that glorious bowl of guac that you see, but what happened is he arrived at the table with a tray containing avocados and several large jars of other ingredients, such as chilies and chopped tomatoes. He asked if there was anything we didn’t want added, and I said I was a spice wimp, so I’d like to go easy on the chilies. He obliged, and proceeded to make the guacamole in front of us. Cool! It was delicious, as was the rest of the meal.

Ali and Ty have visions that are very aligned with mine. They believe in the power of individuals to make change in the world, and they have a blog (which they have recently decided to shift from a collaboration into more of Ali’s focus, since it was initially her idea and passion) and Instagram page to this end. They are currently looking for a van to purchase and outfit for the next chapter of their lives: van-life-ing it around the United States. I thoroughly enjoyed meeting them in person, and hope and trust that our paths will cross again, as we all continue to travel and follow our passions.

After we said our goodbyes, I headed back over the very cool bike-and-pedestrian-only Ronald Kirk Bridge. I took a few moments to bask in the sunshine in one of the groovy green chairs provided, and then received a text from Brandon, inviting me to visit the WeCycle Center before they closed.

So I hopped back on my bike and headed over there, with just barely enough time to make it. Unfortunately, I found the bike infrastructure along the way a bit lacking: grassy hills, rough and loose gravel that at times I found myself unable to bike on (so sometimes I walked the bike, sometimes rode along the grass to the edge). But the way also afforded me some cool views, such as a Kubrick-film-looking underpass at one point.

After the bike paths, I got on back onto roads with cars, and at one point passed a very cool colorful mural along the side of an underpass.

When I arrived at WeCycle, they were just closing their doors, but I got to look around inside a bit while they packed up, and Brandon also helped me to put my bike on a stand to clean and lube the chain myself, using some of the professional tools they had at the shop. This task—which I really should be doing once a week—was shamefully overdue, so it took many blackened rags and degreaser before it was ready to go again. But I felt great after it came back off the stand, fairly gleaming!

We biked back home and had a quiet evening, during which I polished off my leftover enchiladas from lunch.

Tomorrow I’m looking forward to meeting another friend, and experiencing a classic Dallas vegan restaurant.

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Fort Worth Japanese Garden

2/14/22

Having arrived in Dallas yesterday, I had thought I would explore Dallas for the next few days, and then travel to Fort Worth on Thursday, to spend Friday there visiting the botanic and Japanese gardens, before taking the train from Fort Worth to Austin on Saturday.

But then I saw the weather forecast, and decided I’d rather see the botanic and Japanese gardens today, in the 70s, rather than on Friday, in the 50s. (Also, my original plan to visit the nearby Dallas arboretum got shifted when I realized that it is still winter here, so the trees would almost all be bare.)

My Dallas host had the day off, and was willing to drive me to Fort Worth to see the garden today, so that’s what we did, and I think it was a good decision. I’ll plan to post photos of the rest of the garden tomorrow, so that I can focus on just the Japanese garden today. I had heard it was an impressive garden. It was indeed, although I suspect the real splendor would be more visible in a season other than winter. And, sadly parts of it were closed today for construction. Still, it was a large and impressive garden, and the sunshine and a few early signs of spring made it a lovely place to visit.

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Long train to Dallas

2/14/22

Sorry for the delay in blog posts. I was on the train for about a day and a half, and I couldn’t post from there. Then last night I was getting acquainted with my Dallas host, a charming Warmshowers fellow who works as a bike mechanic.

The train ride was long and relaxing. You can see that the landscape was pretty uniform for most of the way. As usual, I enjoyed going to the sightseer lounge car and sipping my “signature Amtrak cocktail” of sweet tea and vodka. I’m glad I made a point to do this on the first afternoon of the trip, because I had forgotten that in San Antonio, at about 6:00 the following morning, the train would be split in half, with the dining car continuing to Chicago (my segment) and the lounge car continuing to New Orleans. So when I awoke and made my way to the dining car for breakfast, I discovered that the lounge car was no more.

We arrived in Dallas in the afternoon, to warm sunshine, although I immediately felt the difference from California and Arizona: this place is filled with deciduous trees! And they are bare. The warm sun felt like an odd contrast to the winter appearance of the trees, and I was taken back to my childhood in Virginia, as well as to a train trip from 2018 when I visited Chicago in a late-winter April. Living in Portland for the past 30 years, with all its gray skies and evergreens, I have become thoroughly unaccustomed to bare trees and brown grass with sunshine.

I cycled through the downtown Deep Ellum district, filled with funky bars and restaurants. There are two vegan restaurants there, which I may sample while I’m here, but they don’t offer outdoor seating, so I might end up getting food to go.

Then I met up with the Santa Fe Trail, a car-free bike path which took me most of the way to my host’s apartment next to a high school and neighborhood park.

Today we are going to experience the Fort Worth Botanic Garden, which contains a renowned Japanese garden. I’m excited!

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A farewell to Tucson and the saguaro landscape

2/11/22

Wow. It’s my last night in Arizona. I have spent about a month here, between the Phoenix area and the Tucson area. (Not to mention my brief visits to Flagstaff, Sedona, Prescott, and Tempe back in October.) The Arizona warmth and sunshine have been such a balm, after California remained just slightly cooler than I had wished for in November and December, and while I looked ahead to Texas and continued to see dramatically cooler temperatures than I wanted.

My Arizona hosts have been wonderful, and I have had so many adventures here.

And the Sonora desert! The saguaros. Wow. I will miss those.

Today I took my host’s advice and visited one last saguaro forest near here: Painted Hills. I biked about twenty minutes west of the house, and got to a hill completely covered with these majestic cacti. (I took a lot more photos than these, but I’ve tried to narrow them down to the best ones.) It was cool to reach the lookout point, too, where I could see the whole city, with the mountains beyond.

I’ll come back here in future winters, I’m sure.

After the Painted Hills, I biked east several miles, into the heart of the university district. I met a friend for coffee in a beautiful park on the U of A campus. Afterward I explored the little area with the park and many shops and restaurants; I got some lunch at a Vietnamese place, after passing some cool vegan sidewalk stenciling.

After my outdoor meal, the sun was starting to dip in the sky, so I decided to head back to the house, stopping once more at the Food Conspiracy Co-op to grab some food for my train trip tomorrow. I also grabbed the perfect farewell-to-Tucson dessert—a slice of vegan chocolate cake decorated with a saguaro stencil—which I savored in a nearby park.

Then on the way home, the outline of a sculpture caught my eye behind some bushes. I walked the bike over to investigate, and found the structure labeled a “bike church.” As I stopped to photograph it, I was startled to hear a man’s voice addressing me. I looked over and noticed a late-middle-aged Native man with a bicycle of his own, surveying the scene from a nearby bench. We ended up having a magical conversation for about ten or fifteen minutes, after which I slipped away to cycle home while the light lasted.

What a perfect way to wrap up my time in this sacred land.

And now, I’m looking forward to the next chapter of my journey: a month in Texas! I’m excited about my 36-hour train ride, which begins tomorrow morning.

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Tohono Chul Gardens

2/10/22

Today was another lovely day here in Tucson, with sunny skies and temperatures in the upper 70s.

My day started in the late morning, when I met up with my friend Jenny, whom I had known for years in Portland before she and her wife moved to Tucson. We met for lunch at a restaurant I had heard highly recommended by others, La Indita. After a delicious meal of spinach-and-nut enchiladas, we continued our chat in her backyard over homemade vegan chocolates, sent to me care of Jenny’s address by my other Portland friends Jack and Morgan, who happen to make professional-quality chocolates by hand as a hobby.

Then Jenny kindly offered to drive me to Tohono Chul, another local spot that came highly recommended by locals. I appreciated the ride, since it was 13 miles away, and slightly uphill. My Oro Valley Warmshowers hosts had generously given me a free pass to the garden, so it was extra special to go and visit yet another place with beautiful desert plants.

I marveled at the saguaros once again, as well as some more pincushion cacti. And I finally got an answer—from another passing garden guest—as to why some of the cacti were covered in Styrofoam cups. I had seen this at several botanical gardens in Arizona, and found it puzzling. Apparently the cups insulate the cacti from the near-freezing temperatures we have had in some recent nights. The guest said the garden staff would remove them in a few weeks, when the danger of freezing temperatures should have passed for the season.

After Tohono Chul, I glided about ten miles back to my host Kumi’s place in West Tucson, on a gentle downhill, this time with smooth pavement in a wide bike lane! The last part of the ride was on the Loop, and I got another spectacular sunset view of the mountains from it. 

When I arrived at the house, a friend of Kumi’s was over for drinks on the patio, so we all enjoyed a nice chat for about an hour, until the temperatures dropped and the friend needed to go home for dinner.

I have one more day in Tucson, with one more nature park on my agenda, and one more friend to see.

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Biosphere2!

2/9/22

Well, today was the day! After knowing of this amazing venture for more than 30 years, I finally got to set foot in the actual place today. It was so cool!

The day started when I packed up from my Warmshowers host’s house, then pedaled over to the table outside the Oracle library to post yesterday’s blog on the library’s public WiFi.

Then I headed back down the road, about ten miles, to Biosphere2. The first part of the ride was incredible. If you recall that a few days ago I rode uphill for about 23 miles, with a headwind for about the second half of it… today I got a taste of the reverse of that, and it was glorious. I didn’t need to pedal at all. I glided down the smoothest pavement ever, in warm sunshine, for several miles.

Sadly, I very nearly wiped out when this smooth pavement came to an abrupt end on the shoulder. The motorists still got to enjoy the buttery road surface, but cyclists were forced off (across a rumble strip, no less—yikes!) onto very rough pavement. This sudden maneuver made me swerve multiple times, especially since my speed was higher than normal on the downhill, and I just barely managed to remain upright. This rude infrastructure awakening put a damper on my mood, especially since that terrible road surface continued for another mile or so before I reached the turnoff.

But once I arrived at the destination, my focus shifted and my mood lifted.

I met my Portland friend Andie, who is in grad school for nursing in Tucson this year. She drove up to meet me at Biosphere so that we could enjoy the tour together, and then she kindly drove me back into Tucson and to the house of my current host, Kumi, another Portland friend, who grew up in Tucson and currently lives here part time.

The Biosphere walking tour lasted about an hour. It was a self-guided tour with prerecorded videos from two “tour guides” on a special app. It was very informative, and I found it exciting and surreal to be walking in the actual location where eight people were sealed into a futuristic science experiment for two years, about 30 years ago. We got to see the kitchen and dining room, one of the apartments, and many of the made-from-scratch natural biomes, including a savannah, a rainforest, a coastal fog desert, and even a mini ocean. We got to tour the orchard where they grew fruits to eat, as well as coffee, although the latter proved to be much more labor intensive than they had anticipated. Apparently the Biosphereans had insisted that coffee be available to them inside, and since everything had to be generated from within, they decided to grow, harvest, and roast the beans themselves. Because of how much time and effort the process ended up taking, they only had a cup of coffee each about once every two weeks.

I’m so glad I got to visit this place. Now, a few more days enjoying Tucson before I head east to Texas.

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A smattering of scenes from Oracle

2/8/22

This seems like a cool little artsy town! I didn’t get too deep into anything, but a walk to the library, Cook Shack, and Patio Café and Market, followed by a short bike ride to the nearby nature park, revealed some pretty cool scenes. (Sadly the ziplining was prohibitively expensive, and also required a companion. Probably would have been really cool; I’ve enjoyed it before in Oregon and Belize.)

Tomorrow: Biosphere 2!

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Uphill to Oracle

2/7/22

[No WiFi where I’m staying, so I’m posting this the next day, the 8th, from the library.]

Whew! Today I biked 23 miles, almost exactly the same as yesterday. But whereas yesterday’s journey was mostly flat and on a car-free path, today was on Rt. 77. Fortunately, for most of the way there was a wide shoulder. But, I pushed up a slight but relentless incline totaling 1700 feet today, and I battled a headwind for about the second half of that. When I finally pulled into the Oracle Cook Shack for some sweet potato fries, I was definitely ready for a rest!

The ride was scenic, though; the Sonoran desert landscape continues to enchant me.

Sadly, I did see three ghost bikes along Rt. 77 (which one of last night’s hosts, Kurt, in pic above, had warned me to expect.) I was sad to think about all of those cyclists as I pedaled past those three points.

One exciting aspect of today’s right was when I passed the signs, and then the turnoff, for Biosphere 2! I will be taking a tour there with my friend Andie on Wednesday.

I remember being fascinated by the promise and potential of Biosphere 2 when I first started hearing about it, in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s (when I was living in Virginia, and then Oregon, so Arizona felt very far away.) I was excited to add it to my itinerary on this trip, as one of several cool Southwestern “experimental” ideas from the latter half of the 20th century, including the Earthships in Taos and Arcosanti, north of Phoenix. I recently watched a new documentary about Biosphere 2; click on the link to watch it if you’d like, before I give my “report” in a couple of days. Such an interesting story.

After the sweet potato fries, I biked about another mile to my Warmshowers host’s house. The host, Kyle, is actually out of state right now, but very graciously offered their home to me anyway. I’m actually hoping to meet them in Dallas, as they drive through on their way home from Missouri; could be another trip synchronicity if we can pull that off! Actually, on that note, does anyone here know of someone in the Dallas area who could host this person, Kyle, and their partner Lauren (both agender, using they/them pronouns) and their two dogs? The lodging could be either indoors, or a place to pitch their tent in the backyard. It would be for a night or two, Feb 15th and/or 16th. I’d love to help them find a spot, because I so appreciate Kyle’s allowing me to use their place here in Oracle! They are vegan, into restorative justice, bicycling, outdoorsy stuff, etc. Let me know if you know of someone!

I arrived at the house in time to sit outside in the sun a bit with some snacks, and now I think I’m going to call it an early night, and get some much-needed rest!

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Taking The Loop to Oro Valley

2/6/22

I had no idea one could bike all the way from West Tucson to Oro Valley—22 miles north—almost entirely on the Chuck Huckleberry Loop Trail. What a treat to discover that today! I biked maybe a mile on neighborhood streets to reach the Loop, and then took some heavy-traffic arterials and a few neighborhood streets on the other end—mostly because I wanted to stop at Safeway for Clif bars, and when I did, I met a cool couple who were excited to hear about my adventures—but other than that, I remained on the wonderful car-free loop for the whole journey.

I’ll let the photos tell the story. Once I arrived, I was met by my wonderful Warmshowers hosts for the night, Kurt and Lisa (and their two adorable and energetic small dogs!) We had a delicious home-cooked dinner; I went on a sunset walk with Lisa to the nearby golf course in hopes of finding the resident grazing javelinas, and/or some coyotes, bobcats, or other wildlife. Sadly, those animals were not out this evening, but we did see a cool small red bird, a white crane, and a blue heron.

Then after dinner we talked for hours about a wide variety of topics. I’m only here for one night—Oracle tomorrow!—but I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my time with Kurt and Lisa.

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On the road again… back to Tucson

2/5/22

After a wonderful two weeks in Tempe, this morning I bade a fond farewell to my wonderful friend and host RoniSue, and biked about 11 miles south to Chandler, where I met an old Portland friend, Stephanie, who recently moved from Albuquerque to the Phoenix area. We met at a vegan comfort-food restaurant she loves, called Nana’s Kitchen. Our meal was delicious, and we got a chance to catch up on our respective lives, which continued when she very kindly gave me a ride down to Tucson. (You will recall that the alternative would have been the Greyhound, where I paid $73.50 for the one-way, two-hour ride, and shared a bus with people who were not all properly masked.) This way was so much better, and we got to enjoy the scenery together and talk about life.

In Tucson, before she dropped me off, we stopped at a local fast-food place called Eegee’s to get a special fruit-slushie beverage they serve there. When I had first arrived in Tucson on the train from San Diego, as I was disembarking, a local told me, “Oh, your first time in Tucson? You gotta go to Eegee’s, and get the lemon Eegee!” So, today I did just that. (It was good, but I probably don’t need to do it again.)

Stephanie dropped me back at a previous Tucson Warmshowers host’s house, Lucia. I was surprised and pleased to learn that we would soon be joined by another Warmshowers guest. When Shadow pulled up on his touring bike a couple of hours later, it turned out that he had been in Tempe for several days as well (and, unlike me, had biked the distance between, stopping overnight to camp near Eloy) and had stayed at the home of Ryan and his family, another Warmshowers host I had stayed with on my first time through Tempe.

Small world. Pretty cool.

Tomorrow I will be bicycling north, to Oro Valley for one night, on my way out to Oracle and Biosphere 2. I’m looking forward to a new adventure!

Do you have your own dream or project, and would like some support or collaborative brainstorming about it? Use the green “contact” button above to schedule a one-hour phone or video call with me!

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Want to support my vision financially? I am in the process of manifesting $50,000 in lieu of a “salary” for the year of this journey. You can make a one-time or monthly contribution, or even become a Fairy Godfunder! (Heartfelt thanks to all my patrons and supporters!)