You may or may not know him, but James Miska is a great person. He's currently undertaking a high quality bicycle tour down the easty coasty, playing music along the way for fun and profit. I wanted to include a little letter here in it's entirety so ya'll can see the joy in this sort of adventure.
"On this, the Autumn 2010 East Coast Music-On-Bikes Tour from Vermont to Virginia, Matt Laser and I have biked our instrument-toting, gear-laden, two-wheeled asses to Torrington, Connecticut!
We started our ride in Northfield, VT and arrived here today at noon. We left at noon on Friday, September 10th, and 6 in the evening, and got here today at 12 noon. I just checked and it's been a 240 mile ride in 3 and a half days! We're very proud of ourselves.
We spent 3 lovely days on Scrugg Farm in the arboreal hills outside Northfield, VT, at the end of a dead-end road, with our friend Leah, who lives in a bus parked in a permanently indefinite locale on a hill behind the main homestead. It was the most paradisial place in a non-typically paradisial place I could imagine. (As in, no palm trees, rough winters, etc.) Patty and Scott, the caretakers of the land, are lovely old folks that treated us like their own kids right off the bat. Patty taught us to can and pickle beets and carrots! The beets had been picked from their garden and were the size of engorged grapefruits. Hung out with cute and playful dogs, played music together, and ate wonderful foods (usually containing a pickled or canned food from the previous year). We made everyone cinnamon mint tea and poured honey whiskey, supplied as part of a parting gift from Amber, in it for the autumnal night times. For those of you that think autumn begins September 20th, allow me to politely rectify your imagination and proclaim to you that the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont follows no such rule. It has started while the rest of the country isn't looking. The leaves here have begun to suffer from imbalance, brought on by old age, and so everywhere you look, they are falling. Discoloration is also becoming a widespread epidemic. I don't know what to do, but, for the sight of myself, I'm beside myself. It's so beautiful up here. And I haven't even caught the worst of it yet, or so I'm told.
We met Mary our first night, biking up to Montpelier, literally yelling at us from the side of the road to come stay at her place when we get there! Who was this crazy lady, you may ask? Well, just a sweetheart who, 7 years ago, had been blessed with enough pleasant interactions on her own bike trip with her husband and daughter, from Seattle to Montpelier, that she felt that it was the right time to shower 7 years of pent up generosity down upon us, the unlikely wayfarers, with freight trains for bikes.
She and her husband Jon, also her bike-mate, treated us to a lovely homegrown meal and beer and wine and brownies and a sweet acoustic jam session! Jon and Mary, are, respectively, great banjo and upright bass players. We were certainly lucky to have been passed on the road at 7 in the evening by this kind lady, and to have met them the way we did. We traded stories deep into the evening, eating late like the Spanish.
We busked at the Montpelier Farmer's Market the next morning and made a quick $20 and left town with treats. We've biked through sun, slept through rain, hustled through cold, suffered headcolds, ate cold pizza, biking between 65 and 70 miles each of these past 3 days, through parts of Vermont radiating with postcard-worthy imagery. And that's just the imagery! Scents and sounds and sensations of such spectacular scale, that I despair at the drought of definitive descriptives. They have been Delicious! And I'm sorry but that's all you get.
We have also, with the advent of Connecticut in our trajectory, encountered the fabled skiddishness and mistrusting nature of folk "from back east". Not to a painful extent yet. But we did get denied on the spot from filling our water bottles at a gas station. How silly...
I am very excited for days to come. We're only half way through our first week, after all. Internet communication is predicted to be scattered showers, but mostly dry. So another update may be far away.
I love you all though, however it is that I know you, and you should well know it or else you wouldn't be receiving this!
Also, if you care to forward this to others that you know that I know (and also love), feel free, and better yet, give me their email address since I probably don't have it.
Yours, from the road,
James Robert Miska..
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