Here as we now power into the 2014 Mayors’ Ride campaign, we just finalized the hotel anchor position for what the NBC Today show is calling the wealthiest city in America,  Des Moines, Iowa. No longer fueled by an industry in support of agriculture, white collar jobs in insurance, publishing, biotechnology, fibre-optics and communications, etc,  have taken over in this city of 202,000 people. And the work force that has resulted  continues to  pour in for all the good clean outdoor recreation  that Mayor Frank Cownie explained to me when we did a  podcast show together back in 2007  <link>   Along with  the research I did of Des Moines, the state capital of Iowa,  for “How America Can Bike and Grow Rich, the National Bicycle Greenway in Action” (here is the Des Moines history page we are running at our NBG Bikig page for Des Moines), I long have sensed there was something pretty special about this place.

Not only are  the cash registers buzzing  there, but according to Forbes,  Des Moines is also number one for  young professionals and for business and careers. All this as Kiplinger, the Washington, D.C. based publisher of business forecasts and personal finance is saying Des Moines is the best city  in America for families.  And to help us show all this off is the beautiful Embassy Suites located across the street from the Des Moines storybook City Hall, both along  the edge of the  Des Moines River (you can the City Hal dome behind the hotel  in the picture above).

It is this lazy waterway that  fuels the commerce of this recreation paradise in a whole new way here in the 21st Century. Instead of making water mills turn for mashing grain and  also acting as a transportation highway for shipping the produce of its nearby fields, the Des Moines River and nearby Racoon River now offer many forms of water recreation as well as a plethora of tree shaded hiking and biking trails.

We’ll come back to Des Moines and the Embassy Suites next Fall after we first  show off all  the bicycle excitement taking place in Ireland and then, in July, the San Francisco Bay Area, with our 13th Annual Mayors’ Ride. Between now and then, besides developing our events with city tours and inter city rides, we’ll also be busy preparing exhibition materials for our planned Sept/Oct Kickstarter campaign.

It  will be the  funding that hopefully results that  will get us the staff we need to tie all 17 of our anchor hotels to the Bike Share programs that are exploding in big cities all over America. We will do this by  getting these lodging purveyors connected to not only public transportation purveyors (airports, bus and rail), but also to  the vendors s (restaurants, museums, coffee shops,, etc) and attractions (parks, arenas, stadiums, points of interest, etc)  their visitors who came without their cars would like to be able to access by bike.

By our doing so, we will build a strong foundation for the 2016 coast-to-coast tour of  our route  we are also seeking to underwrite with our Autumn fund raising crusade. If all goes according to plan, you may also  find me crossing the USA on the  Eagle as a part of this production.