We sleep in a 4-year old, 3-pound, 2-person MSR Hubba Hubba tent. The photo above is from when the tent was new, at the festival where we were married. At RAGBRAI 2025, there are at least four other Hubba Hubbas in the Out of State camp, so one of the last things we do as we set up is place our bins strategically — as much to keep people  from tripping on the guy lines as to help us find the right tent again after a midnight trip to the portos. No one else has a slow moving

Ironically, going to Iowa to ride in a big mobile bike party takes a truck, a trailer, and eight tanks of gas. Before leaving home, you acknowledge your anxiety and ambition and you cram all the portables you think you’ll need — mostly food, housing and bedding — into a bike panier and a bin. You truck your gear and your big solar electric recumbent tandem bike to the starting line. Before you abandon the truck, you bequeath it the big sleeve of sardine tins, the extra batter

In the flow. Again: wake up early. Strike the tent. Breakfast is two hard boiled eggs and coffee. Saddle up and ride ride ride. We are 20,000 bicyclists riding together. All along the highway we converse with our neighbors—something you can’t do as you travel the highway by car. As people pass us we are treated to a steady stream of compliments: “Cool bike!” “Nice ride!” “Are those solar panels?” The Honey Cycle is a recumbent tandem trike with a solar array on top. Typically

Speaks for itself, no caption needed. Our bible. Judy and I are reading “Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World” written in 1953 by Helen and Scott Nearing. Judy describes this book, with some reverence, as the original manifesto of the back-to-the-land hippie movement. Chapter 5 opens by posing the question “What is health?” The authors then launch into an excoriating diatribe blasting the food industry for basically poisoning people. And I a

Welcome home! I wake to a flash of lightning followed by a thunderclap. “We need to pack up the tent before it starts really raining!” Judy  springs into action and I groggily follow. As we put the tent away into our big plastic bins the rain starts in earnest and so we don our rain gear and go to find some coffee. We are at the 52nd RAGBRAI, which is an acronym for the “Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa.” (Register is the name of a newspaper here.) It’s the large

The bamboo bicycle that I made this summer. One sour note you may hear about the eco-friendliness of bicycles is that the bicycle itself...

2025 Sun Lover with new Makerpipe array and kickstand. There Are Two Sides to Safety In part one of this essay I describe the sad state...

Here's a quick view of the Honeycycle at our campsite in Taughannock Falls State Park.

It's sometimes hard to see that you're making progress toward a less carbon-intensive lifestyle. To keep track of what you are, or have,...

Laurence and I are gaga over Kate Soper’s Post-Growth Living:For an Alternative Hedonism , Verso Books, 2020, which we’ve been reading...

Dear Family, Friends, Campmates, and Free Spirits, It is with sorrow and finality that Radar and I have decided we cannot go to Burning...

In part one of this essay I describe how stupid cars are. They are incredibly unsafe, especially if we take a holistic view of safety...

“For over half a century the automobile has brought death, injury and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people.”...

by Laurence Clarkberg Every spring Judy and I like to go on a week-long ebike tour around Cayuga Lake. It’s really quite enjoyable:...

Last night my wife Judy and I were almost killed by motorists. We were on foot crossing Aurora St. in our hometown of Ithaca NY, a...