My trying to develop business support for my 2010 Eagle ride across America while also living on the 40-foot bus we had purchased to support it, became a disaster for one simple reason. What was supposed to be Deprivation Training turned  into Humility Training because I tried to to minimize my use of oil.  It got so bad, in fact, that I had to move to Ireland to be with the woman who would become my wife to try to resurrect it.

During my failed experiment, I learned if I used oil like everyone else, I  could live 9000 miles away and still get my bike trip underwritten. In hindsight, however, being closer to the bus would have been a lot wiser. It would have been a lot easier to get a few more shakedown runs done to avert the disaster that kept us from getting our machine out of California.

From
The Oil in Our Food, Bicycling and Everything Else

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Wondering how much lower I could go, a car answered that question for me when it drove into the enormous wheel I sat on top of <link>. The bike was destroyed and so was my ride.

With the small settlement the guy’s insurance quickly paid me, I flew to Ireland. The woman I had fallen in love with had offered to let me regroup from her home there  Soon,  I also saw it was an opportunity to finish this book as well as rebuild  the NBG’s on-line presence. Feeling so far away from all my connections in Palo Alto, because I did not use enough oil, now, with ready access to computers, lighting, warmth and refrigeration once again, I am now bridging the 9000 mile gap just by using oil like everyone else does.

With the new objectivity I have acquired being here in Ireland, in also now keeping this e-book current, I am starting to see the world around me in a whole new way. I had to go as low as I did, to the level of an anonymous nobody living on the street, to see how blessed I have been to be calling for a National Bicycle Greenway. I finally now see that it has been the ways in which I use oil that have allowed me to think I could press for such a bikeway. Even the honor of being Car-Free was in how I put oil to work for me.

Oil is not only needed for the food we eat or trips we take, we would all be at survival were it not for oil. From the water it pumps into our homes from often far away reservoirs, and then heats or cools them, along with all the lighting and appliances we run, the toasters, irons, dryers and washers etc, etc, the high standard of living we have come to expect, all has its basis in oil.

An appendix chapter in  “How America Can Bike and Grow Rich, the National Bicycle Greenway in Action” FREE HERE