August 13, 2015 – Sun 90 degrees

Miles Today: 12

Miles to Date: 5,546

States to Date: 21

 Day 100 of my adventure – in the Bicycle Mecca of America! Every touring cyclists knows about Missoula – headquarters of Adventure Cycling Association, freecycles bicycle cooperative and a small city’s worth of bike-centric people, traffic-calming paths, and two-wheeled activities. Surly and I spent the day tootling around and talking to a bunch of people doing great stuff in every quadrant of the social-economic and political scale.

First stop: PEAS Farm, a ten acre vegetable farm, one of 21 local food production efforts run by Garden City Harvest. PEAS combines a unique mix of paid staff, college interns and at-risk high school students to provide fresh food produce to CSA subscribers and for low-income mobile markets. They invited me to join them for a delicious lunch.

Next up: Freescycles community cycle shop. Bob Giordino showed me around their repair area, and ‘parts department’. I used the stop to do a quick once over on Surly, who is in great shape.

Afternoon ice cream break; Adventure Cycle Association, where I ran into other cyclists I have met along the road. I also had meetings with their membership director, one of the founders, and the current CEO to talk about tomorrow.

Last stop: Dress for Success Missoula. One chapter in an international organization that assists women in transition to prepare for job interviews by teaching job getting and interview skills as well as giving them appropriate outfits for interviews and the workplace. Terri Griffith and her staff, all of who are volunteers or in work reentry programs, represent the contributions that women emerging from abuse or prison have to offer.

I rode over to my warmshowers host for the night. Bruce Anderson is perhaps the most prolific warmshowers host in the world; several hundred cyclists a year. His sunroom and living room are giant crash pads and he has an introductory binder to describe protocol. Small crowd tonight – just two of us. Every warmshowers experience is different.