Hey guys! Just in case you are completely off the Facebook grid and missed this today - we're cross-posting the video message from Brandi Carlile and The Twins today about Looking Out Across America!
We arrived back home from Brandi's shows at The Beacon Theater this weekend with a renewed excitement for what the Fight the Fear campaign and Looking Out Foundation are going to look like in 2013! We're so honored and humbled to be part of the ongoing efforts of the Looking Out Foundation, and thrilled to know some of the great people who lend their time and energy to championing the causes that the foundation supports.
Alright...we have TWO Looking Out Across America T-shirts to give away this time! Two very generous LOAA supporters have purchased extra shirts to donate to a a couple lucky people in the still shirtless states!
It's easy to enter using the giveaway box below - you can enter by letting us know what state you live in, and get another entry for "Liking" our Facebook page! The contest is only open to people living in the currently "LOAA shirtless" states - Delaware, Louisiana, South Dakota, West Virginia, Wyoming!
Real life has been busy lately!We’ve been working on our route plan, and
have a fairly decent idea of our exact start date now, so that’s exciting!Look for that to be posted on the website in
the coming weeks, so you can get a good idea of which small towns we’ll be
staying in along our route across the country, and where you might want to come
out and say “hi”!Because obviously,
instead of traveling to some fantastic location to see a great concert or
exciting landmark, you probably will want to plan your summer vacation around
having lunch with us in, say, Larned, Kansas, right?!?I knew it…
Endless “THANK YOU”’s to all of you who have supported our
personal expenses for the journey by purchasing a t-shirt, or just sending us
electronic dollars (who deals in the real ones anymore anyway!)!We had more shirts printed over the past week
or so, I picked them up just this morning, and we have already sold out of
Medium and Large again!I think a much
larger order will be called for next time!We will place our next order today, so those of you who don’t have your
shirts yet, no fear, we’ll keep having them printed as long as there is demand
for them!And again, we are so thankful
for our local t-shirt printers, Hayes and Taylor, for working with us on our spastic
orders!Check out their website for some
cool vintage-inspired designs on super-soft shirts.
We honestly weren’t sure the shirts would sell well at all,
and I remember thinking we were taking a big risk ordering the first 50 last
August.Here we are ordering the latest
50 (after some additional small catch-up orders), and wondering if we can even
keep pace with the rate that sales are going lately!And we might have reason to believe that even
more people might want one of these shirts soon…yes, that is a teaser, but
you’ll just have to wait and see! :)If you’re planning on trying to make it out
to see Brandi and gang on tour this summer, grab your LOAA shirt and make it
easier for them to spot you in the crowd!
For those of you that have your shirts already…you may have
seen a call for photos of you in your shirts at some cool location, possibly
something that represents your geographic location, or includes an adorable
animal wearing an LOAA shirt.If you
haven’t already, please send your photos to holly@againtoday.com, and we’ll put
together some cool slide show of sorts once they’re all combined!We’ll also post them on our “LOAA Shirts Out
and About” photo album on Facebook – get out there and see who’s already shared
their pic, and get inspired!
Here's an example: Jessica from Tucson in her LOAA shirt!
That brings us to the last bit of exciting news we have for
you – a t-shirt giveaway!One of our
generous donors has purchased a shirt, to be given to someone in one of the 9
remaining “shirtless” states!See the
list below:
·Delaware
·Louisiana
·Maryland
·North Dakota
·South Dakota
·Tennessee
·Vermont
·West Virginia
·Wyoming
If you live in one of those states, use the entry form
below, and you might just be the lucky winner of your very own LOAA t-shirt, in
whatever size you choose!You can enter
now through Saturday, March 2nd at midnight, at which point we will
randomly select and notify a winner.Good luck!
Our best friend, Emily, is running a contest for a Looking Out Across America t-shirt over on her blog, www.emilysadventures.com. Head on over there and enter to win! The contest will run through Saturday, February 16th at 11pm EST.
Many thanks to Emily for giving up her blog space to us today!
Erica and I have been getting a lot of attention about Looking Out Across America lately, but we would be mistaken to not introduce you all to our wonderful co-stars of this adventure: our bikes. We will both be riding bikes made by Surly, a bicycle company based in Bloomington, Minnesota. The model we both will be riding is the Surly Long Haul Trucker, designed especially for touring bicyclists. This is the toughest bike around, built to carry all of the gear needed for long trips. The geometry of the frame also allows you to sit more upright than traditional road bikes, which is essential for maintaining a posture comfortable enough to spend long hours in the saddle.
When we first decided to ride our bikes across the country, Erica and I had heard of the Long Haul Trucker...in a way it sort of became like the Holy Grail of bikes to us. We purchased the 2011 racing blue model for Erica, and just last spring in 2012, we purchased the 2012 model for me. Erica had no problem finding a model of the Long Haul Trucker that was a good fit for her, but I had a little more trouble. I'm only 5' tall, and it proved to be quite difficult to find any bike at all, from any manufacturer, that fit me well and made me feel safe. Fortunately, we stopped in to one of our favorite local bike shops here in Indy, Indy Cycle Specialists, who ordered up the smallest Long Haul Trucker frame available, and the awesome guys at the shop diligently spent a few days building it from scratch. For those of you that are into bikes, here are the specs of our bikes:
Of course, thanks to the kindness of some of our wonderful friends and supporters, our bikes will be loaded down with plenty of gear to aid us in this adventure. We have already outfitted our bikes with a few items, such as bike computers that will help us keep track of our speed, cadence, and distance. And after months of consideration, we ended up naming our bikes, since they will be our noble steeds for this journey. Erica's racing blue bike has been named Kerouac (after Jack Kerouac, author of the appropriately named "On the Road"), and my speedy black bike has been named Padfoot (a nickname for Sirius Black, a character in the Harry Potter series).
Here we are with Padfoot and Kerouac; hopefully they are ready for the big adventure they were made for!
If you “Like” us on Facebook or follow the “Looking OutAcross America” thread on Again Today, you probably saw our photo and post this
week about the gear that started showing up on our front porch last Monday and
didn’t stop arriving until Tuesday this week.Some amazingly generous individual/individuals purchased at least 1 of
nearly everything on our Amazon Wishlist!We honestly never expected this to happen, unless it was perpetrated by
our parents (who promise it wasn’t them!), and are extremely humbled by the
generosity of people who are moved to do something this extraordinary when they
hear about our journey and our cause – the Looking Out Foundation.
All told, over $650 worth of gear showed up at our door,
which is a huge relief for us to not have to go out and purchase on our own
before we leave! This gives us that much more peace of mind as we prepare our
budget to take the blow of 3 months of unpaid leave and no guarantee of being
able to come back to our current jobs after Looking Out Across America.Not that we’re complaining – we knew the
implications of taking this trip, and are prepared to face whatever we have
to…but we want these people to know exactly how much their generous donations
are appreciated.There really aren’t
enough words to thank them for their kindness, but if those who haven’t come
forward yet would like to, we’d be honored to be able to add you to our
“Sponsors” page.If you’d like to remain
anonymous, we respect that too; just know if you read this that we are
eternally grateful.
Looking Out
Foundation Newsletter
I have a sneaking suspicion that our inclusion in the latest
Looking Out Foundation newsletter prompted our gear angels to go out and buy
some of our stuff – so thank you to the Looking Out Foundation for including a
blurb about Looking Out Across America in your newsletter!If you’ve been out to the Looking OutFoundation’s website lately, you’ll also find that Looking Out Across America
is a featured campaign there.Thanks
again LOF – we couldn’t do nearly as much good as we hope to do with this trip
without your partnership and support!Click here to read the latest Looking Out Foundation news, and make sure
you head over to the website and sign up to receive updates from them, and go
out and “Like” them on Facebook!
Planning
We have had our route maps for a couple of months now
(thanks mom and dad!), and have had a decent idea of where the route goes, and
how long it should roughly take us to complete the trip.Our daily schedule and exact dates of
starting the trip and ending in Seattle (hopefully) have been sort of floating
out in space until this week.While we
still aren’t entirely sure of our exact begin and end dates (a lot of this
hinges around the date of the Seattle Raise the Roof event, which we’re hoping
still happens sometime in September, fingers crossed!), we have started to plan
out our days, complete with daily mileage, stopping points, and working in rest
days.
This is making the whole thing seem a lot more concrete than
it has felt previously.Actually knowing
where in the country we’ll be on a rough date this summer makes a world of
difference – we are actually conceptualizing exactly how many days it’ll take
us to get to our first big climb of the trip (Day 5 or 6), our first time
crossing state lines (Day 14), and our first crossing of the Continental Divide
(Day 52 or 53).Thinking about these
things like steep climbs on fully loaded touring bikes also makes all more real
the fact that we have just over 4 months left until we need to head out.Four months to do all the promoting we can do
of this thing; four months to get in the best physical shape we can to avoid
complete failure in the first couple of weeks; four months to plan, pack, and
figure out all of the logistics; four months to make sure we have everything in
line for our small herd of animals to be cared for in our absence; four months
to get as much done at work as we can.Yikes!
Soon we’ll post our tentative daily itinerary, so everyone can
have a better idea of where we’ll be and when.Hopefully some of you live close enough to come out and say hi along the
way!
Sponsors
We put together a short corporate sponsor proposal letter –
we have contacted just a couple of potential sponsors so far, and got our first
“No” today!Hah, I assume there will be
a lot of those, but hopefully some affirmatives in there too.If you have any great ideas for sponsors, or
think your company might be interested, send us an email and let us know and we
can get a copy of the letter to you to pass along!Or you can provide us company contact info
and we can contact them directly.We
appreciate your help!
Looking Out Across America: The T-Shirt
That title reminded me of Spaceballs...but I digress. T-shirts are still selling - we may actually have to have more printed soon! If you still want one, we'll be happy to send it to you, just mosey on over to our Merchandise page :) And...if you already have one, feel free to tag LOAA in your Facebook photos, or send us a shot of you wearing it - we'd love to include it on our FB page! And we'd like to include you on our Sponsors page if you wouldn't mind!
SOOOO…that’s what’s been going on in our world…hope you all
are having a great 2013 J
I know we promised this video over a month ago, and here it finally is! We introduce you to…dogs and bikes 101! When the weather is even mildly warm (you know, above 45 degrees!), this is one of Louie’s favorite ways to get his exercise in (and Rudy tries his best to make it around the block on occasion!).
Let me introduce you to the stars of the video…these two are like our children!
Louie is our 2-year-old Mutt. He is 62 pounds of sculpted muscle and pure power. This dog was truly built for speed – his rear end is slightly higher than his shoulders, so he can tuck his head, put his ears back, and cut through the air as he runs. He’s sleek, with super-short hair making him more aerodynamic. And did I mention the muscles? Since we took him in almost 2 years ago as a sickly 8-week-old puppy (as a FOSTER dog…yes, we failed!), he has had these hind legs that look like a steroid-popping body builder’s! Ready for cuteness overload? Here's baby Louie right after we brought him home - see, I told you he was a sickly, skinny little thing!:
Rudy, our 6-year-old Puggle (that’s a Pug mixed with a Beagle, though the Beagle really shows through in his mixture), has gotten slightly pudgy in his old age, but still tries to keep up with his brother when he’s feeling spry. No, I can’t take them both out on bike runs together, Rudy would never keep up! So I usually take Louie for about 1.25 miles, then come home and take Rudy about a quarter of a mile around the block, sometimes about a half mile if he’s feeling up for it, though I usually end up nearly dragging him home at the end. He starts out like a sprinter, and has no endurance! And more cuteness overload...here's Rudy as a young man, the perfect Puggle :):
I actually started out exercising our family dog via bicycle when I was about 14. My dad took the dog out for runs this way, and then it became part of my job. It’s easy to get used to, and a great way to exercise dogs who need to expend quite a bit of energy when you don’t have the yard space to let them run like banshees. They also have dog park passes and love to run free and socialize, but that involves loading up and driving to the park, which sometimes involves quite a bit of time that we just don’t have – especially in the Fall and Winter when it gets dark so darn early. And heck, humans can even participate in this one when we’re tired – I don’t even pedal most of the time with Louie, he does all the work, just like a sled dog!
I have a computer on my bike, and have clocked Louie running at about 21.5 miles per hour. To put that in perspective, the average human runs about 5-7 miles per hour. And as I mentioned, I’m not helping him out any by pedaling, so he’s pulling 30 pounds of bike and an undisclosed amount of human pounds behind him! And Rudy has been clocked at a top speed of around…9 miles per hour. Not bad for a stocky guy with short legs :)
So there they are, our sons! And...I managed to kind of relate this post to bikes!
