Greenpeace Letter

9/25/06

Dear Rose and Maya,

Sometimes coming into the office on a Monday morning can be such a
drag. You have to leave the gorgeous day to unfold outside without
you. But this morning's mail really changed that. I opened your letter
and immediately knew it was going to be a great week. Speaking for all
of us, I cannot thank you enough for the your incredible journey to
support Greenpeace and bring attention to some of the biggest challenges
facing our environment today. As Margaret Mead once said, "Never doubt
that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change in the
world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has." I noted in your
blog that after enduring a particularly fierce storm that a rainbow came
out at the end as your reward. At Greenpeace, we truly believe in the
power of a rainbow, thus the name of our first ship, The Rainbow Warrior.

Thank you both, and thank you to all your supporters, for believing
in our work. Your donations will be put to work immediately to help
preserve our ancient forests, protect the health of our oceans, and
promote the use of clean and sustainable energy resources.

We hope you will be proud of the accomplishments you will help us
achieve. Our members are the backbone of Greenpeace, and help us to do
what we do best: act with courage and commitment to protect the Earth.
For up to date information on our latest campaigns, or to take part,
visit us at www.greenpeaceusa.org.

For a Green and Peaceful Future,

Lisa Anamateros
Supporter Services

Stories from a year ago...

Well, it's been more than a year since we began our cross country journey and I find myself looking at the website wondering just what to do with it.

At one of our last posts we promised more stories of all the adventures that we encountered along the way. But the problem was, we never knew where to start. So much was left out... well I can't think of anywhere else to start, except at the beginning. - Rose

I would have been afraid to write this a year ago, but can freely write it now knowing what we accomplished and in hopes of inspiring others. When the idea of biking cross country first flew out of my mouth in May of 2006, it was merely a joke. An idea that I thought would be amazing, yet kind of impossible given our lack of experience. All it took to convince me that it wasn't impossible was Maya's sincere consideration of its possibility. And once I had that, I started to seriously consider it as well. Then we began the research. Turned out biking cross country was more than possible, it was easy, it looked like it took about a month and everybody was doing it; from 8 year old kids to 75 year old adults.

The next thing we had to deal with was getting bikes. Maya had some old road bikes that belonged to her mom and aunt so we called a bike shop to find out about fixing them up for the trip. I can't remember their name brand or components, I didn't know what any of that meant at the time. But the bike shop employee just laughed at us, told us we needed to spend at least 1000 bucks on a new touring bike if we wanted to really do this. It was our first big setback and I began to wonder if this was really as easy as we had begun to think. But when anybody tells you that you have to spend a lot of money on something I become wary and immediately look somewhere else, in this case it was ebay. If people were buying these expensive touring bikes they were probably selling their less expensive (but still good) touring bikes on ebay. Typing "touring bike" into the search engine brought up numerous results. Bianchis, treks, cannondale, fuji...etc etc and I had no idea what any of it meant. I began to think I wanted a bianchi, it sounded like a good name, had been around for awhile. Treks seemed like the newest thing, I had a giant mountain bike that I think had been related to trek. But there didn't seem to be a lot of used treks. I didn't know what size I would be though, so it seemed a bit unrealistic to do it all online. So we got back into the real world and went to visit some bike shops.

It was amazing the variety of response we got from talking to bike shop employees. The first guy, in retrospect, had absolutely no idea what he was talking about. He had suggested the city commuter bikes because of their comfy seats and elevated handlebars. The next guy told us not to allow anybody to convince us that we could bike all day in a commuter bike with only one positon to rest the hands on the handlebars. Good to know. He was informative on the bikes and even offered a discount if we were to buy two of them.

The third employee we talked to was a woman who suggested armadillo tires so that we would get "virtually zero flat tires". The bike shop guy back in new hampshire said these tires would slow us way down. There's always a give and take. We decided we wanted to go fast.