To raise a village

re: N&O Editorial: To raise a village 3/19/02

Thank you for your timely editorial on developing village-style, walkable communities. I agree that local governments should not be expected to prop up private enterprises. However we should expect local governments to support this type of growth by promoting conservation easements and landowner compacts, adjusting zoning codes and ordinances to create infill instead of sprawl, and controlling the impact of development on public infrastructure.

Well designed, compact, mixed-use development can dramatically reduce the automobile trips we choose to make. We will doubtless continue to desire to make trips beyond these villages. It is vital that we develop increased transportation choices. As our long trips become less frequent, we will more often find public transit and road bicycling to be attractive alternatives.

Personally, as a recent convert to bicycle commuting and tourism, utilitarian and recreational cycling, I've been amazed and thrilled to discover the practicality of this inexpensive, clean and elegant transportation mode. Biking to work daily, I get close to Blue Heron, Deer, Rabbits and the occasional fox. Biking home at night through downtown Raleigh I listen to the "trolley" on Glennwood, the people queuing up outside restaurants and the train passing under the Boylan street bridge. Spinning through countryside on weekends, I "discover" communities like Micro, Bynum and Seagrove, the beauty of the Haw and Eno rivers. As the Triangle embraces the new growth patterns you've described, I have no doubt that cycling holds great potential for making our travels more efficient and infinitely more enjoyable.

--Adrian Hands

Nopales Pizza

Nopales (No-pahl-ez) Pizza:

Nopales are the fleshy pads of the prickly-pear cactus.

Here in NC, we can buy them in the grocery store (food lion) as:

1. whole pads in the produce section, or
2. jars of de-thorned, thinly sliced strips in water with a few pearl onions (mexican food section)

if you get the whole pads, see the video below

1. preheat pizza stone
2. brush pizza dough with olive oil
3. pour a layer of salsa verde (tomatillo sauce),
4. add shredded nopales, sliced tomatillos*, mushrooms,
5. cover with a white cheese,
6. toss some cornmeal on the hot stone
7. then bake.

serve with jarritos grapefruit (pomelo) soda or negra modelo

* tomatillos look like green tomatoes but have a papery outer skin or husk. remove the husk. they're sticky to touch and tart in flavor.

See also:

• Audio from Morning Edition (Arizona)
• desert-usa
• wikipedia
• cooking video

Bikes for the World Collection on 6/27

Have a bike that you are not using? Donate it!

Saturday, June 27th, 2009
10AM - 2PM

One-day collection at Headquarters Park Offices,
2224 E NC 54,
Durham NC 27713
(located in RTP on Hwy 54, between 55 and Alston)

The mission of Bikes for the World (BfW) is to collect valuable but unwanted bicycles and related material--parts, tools, and accessories--in the U.S. and deliver them at low cost to community programs assisting the poor in developing countries. The bikes donated to our partner organizations provide much-needed and affordable transportation to laborers, micro-entrepreneurs, farmers, health workers, and students. As much as possible, Bikes for the World uses the donated bicycles to help set-up self-sustaining bicycle repair
operations which can make enough money to pay the direct costs for subsequent container shipments of donated bicycles. Thus, we ask those donating the bicycles to offset the cost of shipping the bikes by making a tax-deductible $10 donation per bike.

http://www.bikesfortheworld.org/

Thanks in advance for donating your old bike. We guarantee that it will go to someone in need and will very likely transform a life.

Four things you can do:

1) fwd this announcement to your work, worship, or friends email lists

2) donate cash or a bike, or both, for the collection

3) volunteer on collection day (write receipts, work on bikes etc)

4) help us get this announcement in media outlets (newspaper, TV, radio, blogs)

For more info: 919-688-9347
wennywigley(at)gmail(dot)com
kevin(at)basicbeats(dot)com

Thanks!
Dan Gatti

Hero: Dervla Murphy

As with so many great things in cycling, I first learned of Dervla through my buddy Gilbert Anderson, who referred me to Dr. Clifford Graves' summary of her book, The Perils of Dervla Murphy. In the midst of a record-setting blizzard in 1963, Dervla Murphy packed a pistol aboard Roz, her Armstrong Cadet bicycle (converted to single-speed for maximum reliability) and accomplished her first international bicycle tour--a completely self-supported solo trip from Ireland to India. In Yugoslavia, she began keeping a journal instead of mailing letters home. That journal was later published as her first book Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle. In Full Tilt, she describes her adventures through Persia, Pakistan and Afghanistan. She particularly enjoyed Afghanistan and wrote lovingly of that country.

Dervla instantly became a hero of mine, but where today was this woman who completed and wrote of this incredible adventure undertaken in the year of my birth? Imagine how thrilled I was to discover that she's still living, still writing and still traveling the world by bicycle!

In the forty years since Full Tilt she has bicycled through, and published numerous books on Africa, the Balkans, and Tibet. Generally traveling alone and unaided, her writing continues to be rich with compelling insights into the cultures and the lives of the people she meets. Recently, she's been exploring and publishing on travels in Siberia. I'll challenge anybody to read her brief Siberian Grand Tour article and deny the sprouting of a seed of wanderlust in their heart.

On her most recent adventures, she brought along her young granddaughters, and chose a gentler territory to explore--Cuba. The Australian published today an excerpt from The Island that Dared as Dervla Murphy discovers the intricacies of rail travel in Cuba.

Being such a fan, I'm proud to boast that I wrote the original Dervla Murphy article for Wikipedia back in 2003.

Mission '07

Back in 2007, while visiting San Francisco, I picked up a genuine Dutch cruiser on Craigslist--a white Batavus with Sturmey-Archer three-speed--and rode it all over the city day & night, on several SFBC rides, across the Golden Gate Bridge, to the beach with Critical Manners, etc.. My employer put me up in a nice hotel during the conference, where I worried that management might object to me bringing the bike inside. I didn't need to worry--the day manager and night manager fought each other for dibs on the right to buy the bike off me when I left town.

But afterward, when the Zeitgeist (biker bar) told me that I couldn't sleep there, I found lodging one night in a real dive of a hotel before moving to the excellent Elements Hostel in the Mission. San Francisco is famously cool and foggy, but the Mission is an oasis of dry sunshininess.

Here's a video:


(or on [vimeo] where you can full-screen it, or download the ".mov".)

Bike-Friendly Bills

Here's a list of legislation in the current NC session directly or indirectly impacting cyclists:

• NC-SB 12 would “Ban Mobile Phone Use While Driving”
• NC-HB 9 "Ban Texting While Driving"
  (passed in the House; now in the Senate...)
• NC-SB 219, "Report Bicycle Crashes to Law Enforcement"
  would make more car-bike crashes require a police report by lowering the minimum damage from $1000 to $500 for the bicycle.
• NC-HB 68 "Prohibited Use of Electronic Devices/Driving"
• NC-SB 334 "Department of Transportation Reforms"
  seeks to cut a lot of politics out of transportation spending--a goal of our new guv.
• NC-HB 148 and -SB 151 “Congestion Relief/Intermodal Transport Fund”
  allows public transit projects to build supporting bike/ped infrastructure. (Thank South Raleigh's Congresswoman Deborah Ross for this one!)
• NC-SB 955 "Bicycle Lights at Night"
  seeks to require a taillight instead of rear reflector
  

(Thanks to NCATA's Ed Harrison for identifying and analyzing these Bills)


The North Carolina Active Transportation Alliance (NCATA) is a fairly new statewide advocacy organization working to improve nonmotorized transportation across NC. NCATA's new Spring 2009 newsletter is now available online at www.ncactive.org and has lots of updates on funding sources, advocacy events and general information about the organization. Download the newsletter and pass it along to friends, colleagues, club members, etc. and consider joining the organization to help support outreach and policy work for human-powered transportation (an individual membership is only $15!!!).

Support Cycling on maps.google

maps.google is soliciting suggestions for improvement. You can suggest, "Add trail information to Terrain view" and "Add bike trail information and biking directions"

Suggest Cycling