Archive for April, 2008
The Invitation!
Hi friends, we’ll be rolling out of New Orleans five weeks from yesterday, and our outreach is in full swing. If you, or people you know, live along our route, please get in touch! Read on for the official launch announcement!
This summer, a group of sixteen women are traveling from New Orleans to New York City on a reproductive justice bike tour. In solidarity with local activists and rooted in the belief that sharing stories is a powerful way to elevate awareness and create social change, we’ll be pedaling from town to town to listen to your stories and document how you and others are working to expand access to reproductive health care, defend reproductive rights, and promote reproductive justice.
It’s a story collective – it’s a bicycle caravan – it’s building the movement for reproductive justice!
The goals of the trip are to document the inspirational, groundbreaking work happening across the country and build horizontal networks to strengthen our collective movement for reproductive health, rights, and justice.
THE INVITATION: Do you or does someone you know live along the route? We’re looking for health care providers, sex educators, supportive clergy, reproductive justice advocates, policy changers, radical activists, doulas, midwives, culture jammers, and anyone who is working to empower women to control their bodies and their lives.
Join us to share your story at a Wanderlust discussion gathering. We’re interested in knowing what you do and why you do it, what the important issues in your community are, and how we can work together to build a strong and vibrant movement for social change.
TOUR DATES
Saturday, May 24th New Orleans, LA
Wednesday, May 28th Mobile, AL
Tuesday, June 3rd Birmingham, AL
Saturday, June 7th Atlanta, GA
Tuesday, June 10th Augusta, GA
Saturday, June 14th Charleston, SC
Saturday, June 21st Chapel Hill, NC
Thursday, June 26th Washington, DC
Friday, June 27th Baltimore, MD
Monday, June 30th Philadelphia, PA
Tuesday, July 1st New Brunswick, NJ
Wednesday, July 2nd FINALE in New York City
INTERESTED? If you’d like to join the Wanderlust story collective and bicycle caravan for a gathering when we come through your town, please fill out this survey by clicking here, or email wanderlust@protectchoice.org and let us know where you are and what you do.
We’re also looking for people to host the riders as they come through town – if you are willing to let all or some of the riders stay with you, that would be delightful! We can sleep anywhere, from backyards to rec rooms to church basements. If you’re able to host please email wanderlust@protectchoice.org and let us know.
For more information about Wanderlust, please visit www.protectchoice.org
Wanderlust is a program of the Pro-Choice Public Education Project
One year ago…
One year ago today, I set off down my aunt and uncle’s driveway in Princeton, Rhonda weighted down with everything I thought I’d need for a solo bike journey of thousands of miles. Which is to say, way, way too much stuff. I carried my pan flute around for about a month before I finally admitted to myself that I liked the idea of playing the pan flute a lot more than I like actually playing it. Also, a little known fact about pan flutes- they’re really, really loud. And because I was mostly either camping in places I wasn’t technically allowed to camp or staying with people I’d never met, pan flute practice times were hard to find.
I made it about a quarter mile down the road before my flag slipped off my pole, which luckily I noticed before I had ridden very far. Does that sentence sound dirty? I didn’t mean it to, but a little bit I think it does. I turned around to retrieve my flag, spent some time digging around in my pack for my duct tape, and ten minutes later was on my way again. The first day was mostly like that – full of wrong turns, false starts, and mystifying street signs. The Nor’easter (you remember the great Nor’easter of ’07, don’t you?) had just passed, leaving massive flooding in its wake, so I ended up getting a ride at one point in a nursery truck (the plant kind, not the people kind). I felt a little bit bad getting a ride my first day out, but in my defense, the bridge I was supposed to take was flooded and the only alternative would have taken me 20 miles out of my way, which seemed daunting, all things considered.
So now, a year later, my days are consumed by Wanderlust 2, looking forward to the day, a little over a month from now, when I will roll out of New Orleans with 15 other women, bound for adventure and destined for New York City. We’ve got our crew set, and I will be introducing them to you early next week, but let me just say for the record that I could not be more excited.
You will never believe what came in the mail today.
I mean, you might. It’s probably really only that exciting to me. But if you’ve been hanging out on Wanderlustwithrhonda for a while, you know that I lost my wallet last summer when I was in Madison, and when I tried to get a new license this year in San Francisco, it got returned to the DMV because I had forwarded my mail. Long story short, I’ve been using my passport for ID since then (which led to drama in and of itself) but I figured since we’re going to have a SAG wagon this summer I should probably bite the bullet and get a NY State license.
Well, today, the post person (mail carrier?) brought me a letter, and I am now the proud owner of a sparkly and surprisingly flimsy looking New York State License to Drive.
Watch out road, here I come.
Now all I need’s a car.
I know, enough about the weather
I only post this because:
A) I am avoiding doing my work for school, so I have to think of increasingly creative ways to procrastinate as I run out of un-school related tasks on my to do list. (not that I actually have a to do list, but that’s beside the point.)
B) I opened up my fancy igoogle desktop window, and in it I have the weather.com box that you see below. I keep track of the weather in New York, so I know whether or not to wear my heavy coat or just my medium coat, and the weather in San Francisco, so I am reminded why I will move back there someday.
Now, normally looking at the weather just makes me depressed, because it says things like “San Francisco, 64 F and mostly sunny” and “New York, 35 F and rain mixed with ice”.
But look! avast! For the next three days, the weather in New York and San Francisco will be nearly identical.
Of course, on Friday it will be 74 in San Francisco and raining in New York, but you know what? I’ll take what I can get.
Riding through the West Village today, I finally let myself believe that one day, it will be warm in New York again. The trees are just beginning to come into bloom, so riding down 9th Street is like riding down a cavern of flowers. I think there are probably worse places to be right now.
And I am proud to report that I did it – I rode my bike all winter in New York. Admittedly, there were a few days when I took the subway because it was nighttime and raining/hailing, and once I even took a cab. But there were also times when it was icy and in the 20′s, and I rode all the way across the Williamsburg bridge without seeing a single other person on a bike. Those times don’t have a whole lot to recommend them, all things considered.
So thanks, folks who read my post on the weather and got things moving around here. A little less rain would be nice, but I’ll settle for no longer having to wear two pairs of gloves every time I leave the house. Sometimes New York just makes me impatient with how fragile my body is. I mean, really. It’s not that cold, hands. It’s not like you’re about to freeze off. But they insist, so I wear the gloves.
I think the Brooklyn bridge is magic
Every day I commute to work from Brooklyn across the Brooklyn Bridge. It’s a lovely ride, although almost always the wind is blowing in my face, which either makes me feel invigorated and springlike or like I want to turn around and go back to bed, depending on how much sleep I got the night before. I hop on the bridge at Jay street and ride to Manhattan on the old wooden boardwalk that is suspended over the traffic. The boardwalk is about fifteen feet wide, and there is a white line painted down the middle. On the south side of the line, there are periodically pictures of people walking, and on the north side of the line, there are pictures of people on bikes.
If you’ve ever biked across a shared pedestrian/bicycle bridge (the Golden Gate bridge on non-weekends comes to mind), you’ve experienced the oblivious pedestrian. They’re usually tourists, which I love me some tourists, but sometimes they’re relatively clueless. How many times have you stopped short as someone backs up to take a picture directly into the path of your front tire?
The thing about the Brooklyn bridge that I think is a pretty strong case for it being magical is, no one ever crosses the line. It can be 2 PM on Saturday and the pedestrian side of the path can be totally mobbed with people, but the bike lane? Magically empty. People don’t walk in it, and when people take pictures in it, they go all the way to the wall so that I can ride by.
For a while I was convinced there were actually courtesy line enforcers patrolling the bridge (mostly because of this one lady’s jacket) but I’m becoming more and more certain that the white line is just magic.
Either way, I like it. It’s almost enough to make up for the fact that before I get to the bridge, EVERY DAY the bike lane is full, and I mean completely full, of the personal vehicles of police. Because where else would they park? I mean, really.
