Low gas summer vacation

Adventure Cycling press release

Take A Reduced Gas Vacation This Summer, Says Nation's Largest Cycling Group

AAA Says: Watch Pump Prices Rise; ACA Says: Watch Travel Costs Fall

Wouldn't it be satisfying to travel this summer without the stress of watching your auto fuel gauge or filling your tank with increasingly pricey gasoline? Adventure Cycling Association, North America's largest membership bicycling organization, says that a low- or no-gas vacation is easy to accomplish, by making a bike your vacation vehicle.

Gasoline prices are moving close to their highest all-time level (after Hurricane Katrina hit Gulf Coast wells and refineries last fall). According to the American Automobile Association, the average price of a gallon of gasoline in the U.S. is $2.92. Gasoline prices have risen by 18% over the last year. AAA projects that prices will continue to rise at least through Memorial Day.

Adventure Cycling Association, a nonprofit based in Missoula, Montana, says that there are many ways to make the bike your vacation vehicle -- and save gas and dollars. Here are four options:

Take advantage of the Cyclist's Yellow Pages (CYP): The CYP is the top international guide to bicycle trips, gear, and tour companies. It's prepared annually by Adventure Cycling and is available for free online at www.adventurecycling.org/cyp. You can also get the 100 page printed version for free when you join Adventure Cycling by calling 1-800-755-2453 or visiting our Web site at www.adventurecycling.org. The CYP covers everything from low cost to deluxe trips, from Argentina to Zimbabwe.

Check the Web for bike travel resources: There are a host of great Web sites for information about bike travel, including: the National Bicycle Tour Directors Association, which lists tours of three days or longer at www.nbtda.com; Crazy Guy on a Bike, which features journals and photos from bike travelers around the globe at www.crazyguyonabike.com; or Bike Forums, an online interactive Web site, with a special section on bike touring at www.bikeforums.net/forumdisplay.php?f=47.

Learn how to travel by bike: Different organizations offer special courses to help you learn how to travel by bike, whether you want to ride inn-to-inn or carry your own camp gear. Adventure Cycling offers introductory courses, for bike travel on paved and dirt roads. These courses are taught by trained instructors, who are passionate about bicycling and bike travel. In addition, if you'd like to try bike travel in the company of more experienced riders, you can take a supported tour, where the food is catered and your gear is carried. All you have to do is ride your bike along beautiful roads and paths -- and past those gas stations. See www.adventurecycling.org/tours.

Do it yourself! You can organize your own trip by using Adventure Cycling\'s specially designed travel maps. Like AAA, Adventure Cycling produces up-to-date maps, which feature the safest routes for riding, along with services a rider might need along the way. Altogether, Adventure Cycling has mapped more than 34,000 miles of routes from the Pacific Coast to the Continental Divide to Midwestern rivers to the Atlantic Coast. Riders can use the maps to design epic or short trips. For more information, click on www.adventurecycling.org. The CYP covers everything from low cost to deluxe trips, from Argentina to Zimbabwe.

You can also learn about local bicycle travel resources through many state and local bicycle groups. A great place to find the group nearest you is www.thunderheadalliance.org/links. And you can get tips on no-gas bike riding from the League of American Bicyclists at www.bikeleague.org. Another source of information is your local independent bicycle dealer, who has all the inside information
on nearby riding opportunities. To track down dealers near you, go to the National Bicycle Dealers Association Web site at www.nbda.com/page.cfm?PageID=32.

Cycling photos

Eric Reagan is a photographer in Knoxville, Tennessee who likes to ride. He's a cyclist who likes to shoot. Eric recently started a blog featuring some of his cycling photos.

For those of you who want to take good cycling photos, take a good look at Eric's cycling photos and look for these features.

• f-stop: Eric opens up the f-stop of his lenses so that only his subject is in focus. Putting the extraneous clutter out-of-focus is called shallow depth-of-field. If you have a fully automatic dumbed-down camera, putting the camera in "portrait" mode is the way you can get closest to a halfway decent DOF. Doing it right takes expensive lenses. Eric mostly uses a Sigma 70-200 f/2.8 lens. His fastest lens is a Canon EF 50 f/1.8. DOF is the difference between a "Wow" and a hohum photo.
  
• Faces: One of my gripes about cycling photos on Flickr are butt shots. Eric does have a butt shot, but the others are all face shots. You can't tell if a butt is grimacing with effort or happy with exhilaration.
  
• Framing: Unless you're copying Graham Watson's shot of the peloton riding through a field of sunflowers, try to fill your frame with one interesting subject. Tight groups can be interesting because they have the appearance of a single subject; a spread out group in a large field is almost never interesting unless theres's something that visually unifies them. Think consciously about where your eye is leading you when you observe a field, zoom in, shoot and take that amazing shot.

If you're a photographer please feel free to contribute more helpful tips for newbies like me.

Tags: photography, cycling, blog

National Bike Month

Bisbee reminds us that May is National Bike To Work Month. Here in the Bay Area of California, people have taken up bicycling motivated more, perhaps, by rising gasoline prices than recognition of a special month. Last night, in fact, I could not get on the train because the bike car was completely full! (Caltrain has a car designated and configured specifically for cyclists and their bikes).

Tags: caltrain, bicycle

Photo info: Caltrans Bike car by Earthworm.

Oil companies deserve their profits

Oil companies are making quite a bit of cash these days. This is one reason why they shouldn't be punished for making money.

Immigration protest halts transit

I had an appointment to look at an apartment in Campbell, CA last night. I took Caltrain to the San Jose station and went over to the VTA Light Rail platform. It was supposed to be a five minute wait for the next train, so I sat and waited. And waited. And waited. I noticed three helicopters hovering overhead. Hmmmm, something newsworthy is occurring nearby.

It turns out a large immigration protest in downtown San Jose stopped all lightrail service (and other street traffic) in that area. I would have just rode my bike to the apartment complex, but I decided against bringing my bike on the train yesterday. A train finally arrived but the apartment office was closed by the time I got there.

Ender's Game

Ender's Game is a scifi novel by Orson Scott Card. I read the short story back in the late 70s and became a Card fan.

I recently discovered that Ender's Game is being made into a movie. It should be interesting to see what happens with the movie. The script doctors will need to change the story significally, I think, to expand the appeal to a wider audience. The children going to Battle School, for example, will probably be teens or even young adults. The book is violent enough, but I imagine the movie will add sex. The action against the "buggers" may be a little closer, and of course the time will need to be compressed significantly since the final battle scenes take place over the span of several months.

Since discovering the movie production, I've picked up several of the Ender ... sequels? companion stories? Anyway, there are several follow-on novels that take place in Ender's universe and use many of the same characters. I've always known that Orson Scott Card is a practicing Mormon member of the Church of Latter Day Saints and I remember searching for (and not finding) bits of Mormon doctrine in Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. Card introduces his theology in Xenocide but I totally missed it. It finally struck like a thunderbolt while I read Children of the Mind. If you're wondering, Card's whole concept of auia, "philotic connections," and creating living beings out of thin air are rooted in LDS theology. I've always thought these aspects of Mormon theology would make for good science fiction; I admit that knowing it takes some of the fun out of reading Card's novels. Oh well.

Ender and its sequels are kind of a sci-fi primer for LDS theology in the same way that Lewis's Narnia series or his awful Space trilogy are introductions to Christian thought.

Tags: orson+scott+card, ender, science+fiction, scifi, immigration, transit, oil

Dog rides bicycle video

I'm not sure if this is believable. Do dogs have the capability to push pedals like this?

Thunderhead Alliance advocacy training in July

BikeDenver is hosting the Thunderhead Alliance Training for bicycle advocacy leaders on July 14-16. The focus of the training will be on organizing and carrying out campaigns to improve pedestrian and bicycling conditions in your community. To find out more, visit Thunderhead's website and follow the links to the Denver training flyer and registration form.

The training will take place at the Temple Events Center on Friday evening and move to REI Flagship Store for Sat and Sun. Registration is $250 and includes the Friday reception, Saturday breakfast, lunch, ride and party, plus Sunday's breakfast and lunch. Discounts are available for additional representatives from the same organization. Leaders of state and local bicycle and pedestrian advocacy organizations are urged to sign up now as space is limited and the price goes up after June 14th.