Friday, July 23, 2010

Last post until San Francisco

Well the journey soon begins! Daun will be heading out of Ottawa tomorrow morning and meeting Lisa at our family cottage for a little family reunion and then to Toronto to leave Tuesday morning to San Francisco.

The ride won't start for another week or so but it will be exciting to see some of the areas around San Francisco before heading north.

Daun's boyfriend, Travis will also be joining the ride but not until Portland...he just bought the ticket yesterday. Oh and we also know when the trip will be ending..or at least that's when our flight leaves, August 27th out of Vancouver so the total trip is pretty much a whole month..so exciting! Check out the "The Plan" tab for the approximate route of the tour.

On a side note, this trip has been quite interesting to plan since there are so many logistics to take care of. If you've never toured by bike there are many things to think about especially when you have to travel by plane. We'll try and take some pre-trip pics to post so you can get an idea of what is involved. Although there is lots of planning we know it will be worth the trip!

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

One week until San Francisco!

It is officially one week until we head out to San Francisco! We will be doing a bit of a pre-tour trip to enjoy the sites around San Francisco and area before we head north on "Get out the Grease".

We have so far raised close to $800 and are getting closer with every donation to our goal. Any donation can make a difference.

Efforts to stop oil flowing continue. As of last Friday BP managed to put a cap on to stop the oil flowing. Check out this site for more information: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/7900558/Oil-spill-BP-mulls-using-mud-to-block-Gulf-of-Mexico-oil-well.html. It would be awesome to finally stop the oil flowing into the Gulf however there is still lots of damage to take care of.

I read a blog post on the Greater New Orleans Foundation today that was posted on July 16th: http://www.gnof.org/blog/bird-rescue-in-buras/ and one comment made by Mark Russell who has been working with oil spill bird rescues for 20 years said that there is always an oil spill somewhere but you cannot always respond to it. It is crazy to think that our planet is under such stress just so we can use oil. It really makes you think and not to say that we should all not use or buy oil products (it would be nice in a perfect world) but it just really makes you think about what is going on if spills are happening all the time without people taking action.

Even in Canada things go unnoticed, for instance, in northern Ontario I (Daun) remember communities not even having recycling programs (this was eight years ago so this may have changed by now). I could not believe that part of the country (i.e. Halifax and PEI) had really awesome municipal composting programs/recycling and other communities had no program in place to recycle even paper.

I definitely don't have the answers and it appears sometimes that the leaders of the world don't either but I guess on an individual level you have to take it one step at a time or you will probably drive yourself actually crazy.

For Lisa and I our one step at a time is more of one pedal at a time and we hope that the fundraising will help... so here we come San Francisco!

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Get out the Grease goes National!

I just found this small mention about our ride on the Greater New Orleans Foundation website. This press release was posted on July 2nd, 2010. The article talks about all of the fundraisers happening for the Gulf Coast Oil Spill Fund and we got in it!

Check out the article at http://www.gnof.org/home/lemons-booze-biking-and-more-to-aid-the-gulf-coast/

Updates

It has been a few weeks now and we have been busy with getting ready for our trip. We finally found a company to make shirts for us so we will be sporting "Get out the Grease" cycling jerseys for our ride. We just hope they arrive on time before we head out...

To date we have raised $735 which is awesome but we still have a ways to go until we reach our goal!

Regarding the oil spill, it seems as though another effort to stop the oil from gushing out has been made but apparently it's just temporary. I just read an article and it made me realize that this disaster has been going on for now over 3 months! That is just unbelievable! Check out more updates by just goggling the web for articles, there is so much news out there on the spill.