Rachel is finally in the state of New York and she’ll be arriving in Brooklyn in no time at all!

To celebrate, we’ve got two Sustainable Cycles events planned!

Saturday, August 3rd, 3:30-6pm

Brooklyn LaunchPad, 721 Franklin Ave, BrooklynLaunchpad.org

Sunday, August 11th, 7-9pm

Bluestockings Bookstore, 172 Allen St., Bluestockings.com

Check out the Facebook events for more details:Facebook/Launchpad event and Facebook/Bluestockings Event 

Come to one or both! Bring friends! There will be food, stories, menstrual cups, and more!

I heard Rachel is even planning to have a bicycle-powered ice-cream churner making strawberry ice-cream! Can’t beat that!

Hi, all.

Owen and I are staying with his grandmother on the west side of Cleveland. The event in Oberlin went well–about 15 people attended! And, I decided to draw my blog post:

We stayed at the George Jones Memorial Farm with an old high school friend just outside of Oberlin. They grow veggies for City Fresh, a CSA that feeds NE Ohio.

Cousin Geoff helped weld a bracket for my safety flag in Chicago–safety first!

The Burr Oak tree at Owen’s uncle’s farm in Pardeeville, Wisconsin. From Chicago, we got a ride to Wisconsin and spent the 4th of July with family.

Then, we took the ferry across Lake Michigan to Muskegon, MI. And we started biking again from there!

Ann Arbor was a great discussion. The people at Mich House (part of the Ann Arbor Student Co ops) were so hospitable! Shower, snacks, and a great time.

Heartland Gay Pride Parade in Omaha.

A few weeks ago, Sustainable Cycles got written up in the New York Village Voice. Read the article here.

People are overall stoked about this project as I continue along on this bike ride. I have given cups away at organized events and during random conversations with hosts and people on the street. Some have expressed interest in becoming ‘spokespeople’ for alternative menstruation, and one person wants to ride for Sustainable Cycles next summer!

Looking forward to heading into the city August 3–come on out, meet us at the border, and ride in with us! I’ll give specific time and place soon…

Upcoming events:

• July 18, 2013: 7pm at Burning Books. 420 Connecticut Street Buffalo, NY 14213 (RSVP to the FB event)
• Aug 3, 2013: 3:30-6:30pm. Launchpad. 721 Franklin Ave Brooklyn, NY 11238
• Aug 11, 2013: 7-9pm at Bluestockings Bookstore. 172 Allen Street New York, NY 10002

Hi from humid Ohio. As I have now thoroughly proven, updating the blog is hard for me!!

I am still not at a computer, but I will be when I get to Cleveland in a few days. Here are some sneak peak photos, and I will explain in further detail at said future point in time.

Exciting things are happening. Event planned in Oberlin and in Buffalo. And in NYC! Details to come.

Friends,

I sit in Chris’s childhood home in Omaha, Nebraska. (Chris is the lone biker we’ve been teamed up with since Baker, Nevada). Owen and I biked in yesterday from Lincoln, where we spent a couple of days with a friend of a friend. I held an event at the Indigo Bridge Book Store in a cool part of town. This event was attended by the highest number of male people so far–3! 

We all circled up and passed around sponges, cups, and cloth pads. Two people were already cup users, but the rest were very new to the idea. 3 women left with new DivaCups to try! 

Discussing female anatomy. It’s good to have different sexes in the event to give some perspective.

An incredible man and incredible cook! Pepe of Pepe’s Bistro treated us to a delicious vegetarian meal just because he heard we were biking cross country. He helped to start the Lincoln Bicycle Kitchen, an awesome fix-it-yourself bike shop.

A great place to go fix your bike! The Lincoln Bike Kitchen. We got to clean up and tune up for free, wahoo.

If all goes according to plan, we’ll be in Chicago in one week. You’ll hear from me then!

I write from the library at Colorado State in Fort Collins, CO. We biked here this morning with great weather. But what’s even GREATER than that is the workshop (well, 2 actually) that Sustainable Cycles put on yesterday in Boulder.

The first was at the Boulder Valley Women’s Health Center, an organization that provides affordable reproductive and sexual healthcare to people. The workshop was held during lunch, so clinic workers trickled in and out during the hour. We had a great disscussion, and 5 people got new cups. Most exciting, though, was that 3 of those people are high school students! The clinic has a program with local high schools where “shapers” or peer health educators, hang out after school and talk health. None of them had tried a cup before, and I look forward to what comes out of their experience! They had some good suggestions like “You should instragram this” and getting more into social media to access the youth…instagram about your cups, spokeswomen!

L to R: Rachel, 2 ‘shapers’, and Sundari (the lovely woman who helped me organize both workshops. Thank you, Sundari!)

Second was at the Radish housing co op near the University of Colorado. Over 20 people attended! I gave away about 10 more cups, and we had an almost 2-hour discussion about menstruation, menstrual products, birth control, sexual health, and health in general. I am stoked to create a space where people can talk freely about what’s going on with their periods, share experiences about methods of birth control, and ask specific questions about how to clean a cup or a cloth pad or a sponge! There were a range of people there–from mothers to almost-mothers to pre-menstrual (though she may have been dragged along by her mom :P).

The workshop at Radish Co op–we all squeezed around a table in the living room.

It’s exciting, it’s happening. I got many thanks for doing this project–and I thanked them for attending and sharing! The goal of this bicycle ride is to get people talking and researching about periods, and to create a community to support each other in doing so. I think it’s working.

Greetings.

I write from Littleton, Colorado, where we have spent 5 days vegging out, hanging with my family, and eating delicious Thai food cooked by my uncle! And also exploring Denver a little bit–going on a fun night-time party bike ride, checking out the local bicycle co op, and visiting the biggest REI I have ever entered (it has man-made white water rapids to test out rafts…) Tomorrow we’re off to Boulder, where I’ll be giving a talk at the Boulder Valley Women’s Health Center. Excitement!

The hospitality we have encountered in this state is incredible. We’ve been taken out to dinner, offered showers, places to stay, and have been hooked up by total strangers–one person from warmshowers.org wasn’t in Colorado Springs when we needed a places to stay, but called his PARENTS, and they welcomed us even though they’d never done anything like that before. And, biking into Telluride, we got offered two places to shower within 10 minutes. AND, a woman we met on the Dallas Divide Summit thought to connect us with her friends in Salida a couple of days after we met her. Colorado is treatin’ us great.

Ok! Off to sleep–up in 6 hours to get on the bike again.

And remember, Owen is way better at blogging than I am: odogsodyssey.com

It’s lovely to have so much water to bike by. No more 80 mile stretches of dry desert.

Going from Dolores to Telluride, we biked over a 10,220 foot pass. We slept at a bike mechanic’s house in Dolores–he just invited us to stay after we bought some supplies from him. A great welcome to the state.

Gunnison, CO. After Utah’s 3% brewskies, the boys and I were glad to enjoy a nice Colorado cold one!

Monarch Pass Day. Over 11,000 feet tall–our highest summit yet! We almost hit 50mph going down the other side. It’s a good thing our bikes were made for this!

Very bike friendly mountain towns. Lots of art, lots of creativity, and lots of people who bike over mountains just for fun.

Hello!

I am sitting in the living room of a kind stranger found on warmshowers.org–that awesome website that connects bike tourists to people opening their homes to us. Showered, laundry drying, and resting now! Owen and I met up with Chris, another 23 year old biking to the east coast. It’s nice to have more company.

Last weekend I got a little food poisoning, so Owen and I spent an extra day with a wonderful German exchange student in Cedar City who we found through couchsurfing. But! We have made up for lost time this week–our all-time high was 119 miles in one day! Utah is BEAUTIFUL. Tomorrow we’ll be in Colorado!

Some differences between Nevada and Utah:

-no casinos in every town in Utah
-I notice fewer bullet holes in the road signs in Utah

Enjoy the photos. I can’t put captions on them, so guess where we are and what we’re doin’!

Also, Owen is way better at blogging than I am: odogsodyssey.com

Howdy.

I am typing on my little iPhone in front of a little a diner in a little town called Austin*, Nevada. Today we biked 70 miles and climbed ’bout 3000 feet. The week has been great! Since last time, we biked over the sierras (except for a 40 mi hitch hike which we won’t talk about), made our way into Nevada, stayed with some wonderful people through a bike tour website called warmshowers.org (yes–even you can host cyclists like us in your cozy homes), and did some city park camping.

We are well on our way, have met some mighty friendly Americans, and are stoked to keep going.

After a rain just outside Carson City, NV.

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Grapes! It was a nice rest stop at the Middlegate Station–which breaks up the 106 miles between Fallon and Austin.

*Correction: I meant Eureka, Nevada. We biked from Austin that morning.

Hello, friends.

Today Owen and I climbed 2000 feet and rode about 60 miles from Sacramento to Placerville. Tomorrow and the next day we’ve got some major climbing as we go over The Sierras. Oh, menstrual cups, the things I do for you.

In other exciting news, Owen and I were in the Santa Monica Daily Press yesterday.

That makes us more famous than we were last week! Link to article: http://smdp.com/samohi-alumni-take-on-cross-country-bike-trip-for-a-cause/121916

I got tired of riding my bike. So I found this pony.

The state Capitol.

‘Til next time!

Hey folks,

Day one was yesterday, and was pretty awesome. We took BART (public transit) from Oakland to Concord, and biked 63 miles to Davis. It was smooth riding the whole way–with bike paths and bike lanes, a flat landscape, sunny weather, and a nice ciesta in the afternoon at a park in Dixon. A nice 6 hours of riding, and we’re not too sore today. Owen and I are staying with my friend near downtown Davis–which is such a bike friendly place!! Bike paths everywhere, bike parking everywhere, bike tunnels, nice roads, and even a “press for green light” button at some intersections. Pretty awesome.

Owen and I are very stoked! And we are settling in to our new lifestyle very nicely.

Dipping our back tires into the Pacific Ocean at the Emeryville marina. That’s SF in the back.

The start line: 6:30am on Saturday, May 4. We’ve got a long way ahead of us…

Just look at that smoothness! Great roads the whole way.

A garden work party at my friend’s co op. (I’m sitting in their living room right now).

On the Sustainable Cycles front, I have gotten some great responses from people I’ve been talking to. Many of them already use cups and are really supportive of the project. Others use other methods, but still think what we’re doing is great.

Tomorrow we ride to Sacramento, then to Placerville, then Kirkwood, and onward!

Check out an article about us on the LA Streets Blog, oh yeah.

Happy Cinco de Mayo!