Picture: Students at U of M Morris hold a 350 flag, along with an American flag and a Minnesota one too! Thank you for putting on an amazing potluck event!
10-15-09
I left Dave Jacobson's place early in the morning as the sun was just beginning to rise. I knew that I would have a long day ahead of me. It rained all night, and I prepared myself, taping seran wrap over my helmet so that I wouldn't catch a cold. I must have done something right though, because as soon as I stepped outside the rain stopped until I got to Morris.
The road to Morris was beautiful and dotted with farm and prairie. Along the way, I began to realize how much more spectacular it is to bike someplace than to drive there. When your driving, everything whips past you in a blur, but when you bike, everything is continuous, connected, and you meet so many interesting people and have so many exciting experiences that you may have missed otherwise.
When you ride for a long while on bike in an area without many towns, there is a problem that arises every rare once in a while: where to find a bathroom. As I arrived in Starbuck, (yes, there's a city called Starbuck and it doesn't have a Starbuck's Coffee shop... yet.) I found my answer: a gas station! Surely there would be a bathroom there! After finishing, I went to the air pump to fill my tires and ran into a professor from Morris who happened to teach classes that some of the students I were about to speak to are taking! She's teaching co-teaching a class right now on writing and climate change. This type of chance meeting has been one of the patterns that has run through this entire trip (along with weird weather and the fact that invasive lady beetles are everywhere in the state).
After riding seventy miles, the longest day of the journey, I arrived in Morris just in time for the meeting with a student environmental event put on by the U of M MPIRG group. We gathered in a local library, and my empty stomach was happy to learn that it was not just any gathering; it was a potluck gathering. After a long day on the trail, there is nothing as good as a potluck.
I talked about Bike MN 350 and learned about all of the amazing things that are happening at the U of M Morris that put other Minnesota Universities to shame. For example, Morris has an enormous wind turbine and is planning on putting up two more in the next couple of years. It also has a geothermal program and is involved with state of the art alternative energy education. One of the students mentioned that it's cool that Morris not only has clean energy, but it prepares students for jobs in clean energy too.
I spent the night at Colin and Jenna's apartment, two environmentally engaged students at Morris who happen to be brother and sister. Colin cooked up a tasty vegan meal and then I crashed on the couch for the night, preparing myself for the long day ahead of me: the road to Montevideo.
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