Every Day Adventurers

Brad Lancaster, author of Harvesting Rainwater, lives in Tucson Arizona, which receives less than 12″ of rainfall a year. Brad has been riding an Xtracycle for nearly a decade, and well, it shows. This post was lifted from his blog, and we encourage you to read the full article there. If you are interested in rain water harvesting, consider Brad god, and his book the bible.

Years ago at a red light I looked into the car beside me and saw the frowning driver’s hair blowing into the back seat as though she were leaning into a mighty storm. But her windows were up. The gale was coming from her air conditioner — on a beautiful day when an open window could just as easily cool and refresh. Then I coughed, and looked back at her tail pipe spewing out toxic exhaust. I was on a bicycle, and loving the day, except for the coughing. And that’s when the simple realization hit me.

Everything we do, every choice we make, has consequences. And no matter how seemingly simple, they can be profound. We can choose to be and live problems — or solutions.

I realized every time I drove (or mechanically cooled myself) I was directly poisoning air, water, soil, and myself. However, every time I rode my bike, my exhaust was never worse than a flatulent. When I drove my car, I fueled it with toxic gasoline from a distant corporation. When I rode my bike, I fueled me, often with a burrito made from locally grown tepary beans and cooked in my backyard solar oven. A burrito I would’ve eaten anyway now tasted even better.

>>read full post here

Congrats to Sam, the only entrant :P, for the Morebadasser Video Contest. But, not to be outdone, Sam entered two videos (thanks, brother!). And while we’re down with moving homes via bike parties and producing less CO2, we found his second video, Xtracycle Cyclocrossing to be oh-so-much-morebadasser! Enjoy and Sam, we’ll be in contact to get you your goodies!

Xtracycle More Badasser Cyclocros 2010 from samh on Vimeo.

Living in apartments allows you to see other humans’ living habits a bit closer than you’d usually like to experience. I live in a quad-plex in Oakland, in a neighborhood that’s gentrifying and has seen worse days.

Oakland, and the Bay Area in general, have always been on the cusp of the next Green/sustainable revolution. In the past two, three years we’ve gotten a cool curbside composting program going (although I’d rather see the stuff get trucked to the Oakland Port where giant digestors could capture all those high energy vapors of composting instead of letting it waft into the air as they drive it tens of miles away to rot in open fields contributing green house gases to the atmosphere) and our recycling is thorough and impressive (Berkeley just upped their investment with new bins).

I also take pride in limiting my impact on our shared environment. I don’t own a car, I ride my bikes (Xtracycle Big Dummy included), I compost all our food and paper wastes, recycle, take short showers and grow some of our own food. So it pains me to see my neighbors tossing perfectly good recyclables into the trash, or food that could easily be composted in the trash or old clothes that just need a simple wash getting dumped instead of donated. That last one just happened, and in a big way.

We have large Murphy bed closests in our building. Suffice it to say, they hold a lot of junk (mine is full of bike parts and stuff). My neighbor’s daughter was cleaning out her closet, which seemed to have been collecting things since middle school (she’s 18 now). Bag after bag was filled with clothes, shoes, books, pencils, pens, etc. All about to be trashed! Had I not had the (un)pleasure of looking at the garbage from our kitchen window, all that stuff would’ve ended up in the landfill. We have thousands of people who can use the items she was tossing out. Our economy is still shedding jobs, unemployment is through the roof, and coming from parents who lived on food stamps during Reganomics, I’m sensitive to such non-chalance.

So, I dug through her stuff, salvaging what could be donated. I encountered her as she was taking out even more items(!) and explained that almost all the stuff she was tossing could be donated. I also took the opportunity to explain that recyclables belong in the recycling container. I still need to talk with her mother and her about the needs for all of us to take more responsibility for our waste and pull as much of it as we can out of the waste stream and return, reuse, recycle it.

Here’s my load, about 80 lbs of shoes, shirts, pants, jackets, books and other odd ends that I pedaled over to the East Bay Depot Center for Creative Reuse on Telegraph and a local thrift store.

Loads of Donation Items Being Reused Instead of Dumped

Every little bit counts. :)

Bill Kiely’s Big Dummy is no stranger to sun and sand, as he and his family hit the surf via bike on a regular basis.  He shared some of his ‘Big Dummy’s Big Wednesday’ photos with us:

Xtracycle Big Dummy on Spring Break

Not only can an Xtracycle get you and your surfboard to the beach, but it’ll help you dry your towel as well!  Keep on ridin’.

Luke Krueger, Xtracycle owner and active lifestyle dude, managed to snap his right leg leaving him immobile and dependent on his friends and family to achieve his daily tasks. Five weeks later, Luke is getting into more active with his physical therapy and found a way to get exercise, find his independence and smile, just a bit:

Luke Krueger shoveling cobb with Xtracycle as couch

Here’s a photo from one of the many ways my Xtracycle has enabled me :) I’m rehabbing from a broken leg and Doc cleared me to ride a stationary bike a couple days ago. I realized I could sit on the snapdeck of Rover here and be nice and low and safe, recumbent style, while still being able to pedal and reach the brakes. I’m sure y’all have tried this lowrider position. It got me out on my own for the first time in 5 weeks! After miles of smiles I came home and realized I could sit on the snap deck to do yard work as well, since I can’t stand on my leg yet. Here I’m sifting rocks for cobbing. Crutches on the longloader, water in the bottles, tools in the pouches.. this is so much better than the couch! Go team.