Ogden: Amnesty Int'l benefit, and KWCR 88.1

Today was RAD - Ben and I left Logan at 11am and pedaled hard towards Ogden, trying to make sure we got to the KWCR 88.1 studio by 4:00 for our LIVE-on-air performance. We passed through a number of Lord Of the Rings-worthy landscapes...

Interesting moments:

~ Ben does the amazing kneel-pee, which can be executed at the side of any road, no matter how little cover there may be. It looks like he's praying. I'm inspired to emulate (pic to the left). The kneel pee technique will now baptize the earth all the way down to St. George. Hallelujah.

~ Being skinny, being vegan, I try to stuff as much bananas, apples, chlorella, peanut butter, maca, Clif Bars, and anything else that'll fit in my face when I'm out on my bike. I figure that if overall, I'm putting healthy nutrient rich stuff in my body, I'll have some energy left to perform.

At our first food break, Ben pulls out these tennis ball sized clusters of what look like a multicolored model of an atom's nucleus. I'm like: "what the hell are those?" Ben explains with his mouth full of marshmallowy crunchy dust, that his girlfriend Drea made them for him, and they're like rice-krispie treats only made with Trix instead. I'm like "Trix like, silly rabbit Trix are for kids?" "Yep."
I shared my food with him for the rest of the trip.

~ Ben and I traded bikes for about 10 miles ~ me riding his BOB trailer and he riding my XtraCycle. There wasn't even a comparison; the Xtracycle handled so damn well with its long rigid framing, it was just scary to be on the BOB. At one point, I tipped the BOB over in the middle of an intersection into a BOB-typical pinched angle. It took us 30 car-honking seconds to figure out how to angle the bike in such a way to leverage the bike upright against that tweaked angle.
The XtraCycle on the other hand, you can get up in 3 seconds with just a solid shove. So basically what I'm saying is, if an evil blue genie ever comes out of a water bottle you rub at some point during a bike trip in the future, and the genie says "I'monna transfowm yo ass to a bike-hauling system!" request that the genie make you an XtraCycle.

Weber State University sits up on this killer hill, which is great for WSU, and not so great for dudes pulling obscene amounts of music equipment. So we pulled in to the KWCR studio hella late at 4:45pm, tired, Ben wiping the banana and peanut butter from his Quigley-Down-Under-era Burt Reynolds mustache, me from my growing cactus garden, and both of us off our instrument cases where it'd dripped in patterns closely resembling seagull shit, apologized to Brad Denney, the extremely gracious music director of KWCR, and started unpacking our instruments.
Despite the rush, we were hella stoked to get on the air. Ben ran to the bathroom and I refilled my water bottle. 4:55. We started tuning, 4:58. "OK you guys ready to go on in a couple minutes?"
Head's still buzzing and light from the ride we took our seats in front of radio mics the size of a roll of paper towels and tried to not fall off the nice rolly chairs.
At one point I was sure I was going to become a comatose Mexican there in the studio if I didn't get some food, so I pulled out a Clif Bar, packaging all crinkly and loud and started munching there during the interview.
Brad was nice enough not to throw me out.
Ben noticed this, so he motioned for me to pass it over.
As Ben had guessed, he didn't throw Ben out either.
We were happy.
There we were, recovering from our gorgeous 50 mile bike ride, getting interviewed and playing LIVE on the air, munching on a noisy-ass Clif bar, and already getting prepared to play our Amnesty International benefit that night, powered by the pedal-powered PA.
THIS was sustainable rock & roll bike touring!

Thanks to the Stout family, Katelyn, Dani, Dani's hubby who's name I forgot this second, and their super generous mom, the Amnesty benefit was bad ass. The scene up at WSU is strong, and not only because the audience pedaled the PA for the whole show like champions, but also in their involvement with cool social justice orgs.

Thanks to Brad Denney for his comprehensive hospitality and support of SHAKE YOUR PEACE! and for putting us up for the night. You the man Brad.