On the Way East

Hi friends,

Since we left Montana we’ve been driving for several days on the way back east, and until we reach Chicago we won’t be doing any filming. Actually we only have a handful of interviews left before we get back home in 2 weeks, then another 15 videos/interviews to film back in New England. We’ve been to some interesting places since Missoula so even if we didn’t film much I thought they’re worth mentioning.

Saturday night we stayed outside of Missoula and got to meet Priscilla the blogging goat (http://www.pricillaspeaks.blogspot.com/) I knew kids were computer savvy but this was something else…(pun intentional)

Sunday and Monday we stayed in Burlington, Wyoming, which is about 2 hours outside of Yellowstone National Park. We stayed at the Wayfaring Traveler Llama Ranch which has a vegetarian bed and breakfast, enjoying the hospitality of our hosts Mike and BJ Carlson and the 35 llamas they have. One llama, Pudley, wrote their last Christmas letter. First a blogging goat then a letter-writing llama, go figure. We visited what we could of Yellowstone, but the park is so big as to need several days to see everything! We saw Old Faithful, the most popular geyser in the world (not the biggest but the most popular because of it’s regularity, about every hour give or take). I did film the spouting of Old Faithful to use in a video about geothermal energy, since we weren’t able to get an interview with a company in California that is developing deep-geothermal energy production for electricity. We saw bison, a moose, and outside the park we saw a few hundred (yes, we counted) pronghorn antelope.



Tuesday we drove to Cheyenne and stopped in Thermopolis to visit the Wyoming Dinosaur Museum, which has 60 active dig-sites in within the 500-mile area. On the way out of Thermopolis we drove down into a canyon aside the Wind River, and saw the most amazing natural optical illusion ever! The river was flowing in the wrong direction! We drove down….and the river was flowing….up? We checked the GPS and we were actually ASCENDING even though it looked like we were driving DOWN into the canyon. It was totally bizarre. I kept checking with Jen reading the GPS but our elevation kept going up, and the river was indeed flowing down even though it looked like it was flowing up. Very strange.

We got into Cheyenne, Wyoming after dark and suffered the consequences – the entire front end of the Beetle and the cargo carrier on the roof was COATED in bug splatter. The next morning we saw the carnage and it was really disgusting. There were actually flies buzzing around the front of the car. I didn’t even want to touch the roof rack to get the luggage out.



We drove most of the day yesterday to get to Lincoln, Nebraska for a presentation at the UU Church in the evening, and enjoyed talking with the folks there. One of our hosts works for the Nebraska Forestry Service and is working with the University of Nebraska to develop a new crop to grow in the state for biodiesel: hazel nuts (also called filberts). Hazel nuts have double the yield of vegetable oil as one of the most popular crops here, soybeans. They have many environmental benefits including no irrigation or pesticides required, they sequester carbon, they are perennial so they don’t need to be replanted every year, and they are harvested using current equipment. They’ve been working on developing a hybrid variety that will grow well in the Nebraska climate. Yesterday afternoon we heard tornado warnings on the radio for southern Nebraska – the kids looked worried and I was excited – great video! Fortunately for us, no tornados.

So that brings us up to speed on our way east – we’re in Des Moines, Iowa then to Chicago where we’ll spend several days and get some video for our Green City Spotlight series.

Be well,
Colin
www.OurRenewableNation.org