Travel Gear: Clean Clothes

For me, freedom is traveling light with just one change of clothes. That still translates into wearing clean clothes every day.

The downside is doing a bit of laundry each day.

Urban Bike: Mill City

Much of the early wealth of Minneapolis came from grain. This grain legacy translates into locally headquartered companies like Cargill and General Mills.

Cargill, the largest privately held company in the country, manages 25% of US grain exports. General Mills manages ubiquitous brands like Betty Crocker and Pillsbury.

The first flour mill in what is now Minneapolis was built in 1823 to serve Fort Snelling. From the 1880's through the 1920's, Minneapolis earned the nickname "Mill City" because its mills were the most productive in the world.

I spent a day on my bicycle finding significant examples from these productive times.

Freekin' Cheap: Free Landline Phone Service

Google Voice and a VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) adapter give us free dial tone on all our landline phones.

Almost all calls within the US and Canada are free. International calls are near enough free.

We use our home landline phones the same way we have always used them. People continue to call our old landline phone number.

We've been using Google Voice since 2009. It has most of the features of regular POTS (plain old telephone service) and a few extras for people who like to travel. It emails voice mails, filters spam, and lets us have a single number for our home and cell phones.

It takes a few days to set everything up, but if you value saving around $4,000 over the next ten years, this is the way to go. There are five steps:

Urban Bike: City of Lakes

Today I'm off on my bicycle to visit every lake in Minneapolis, City of Lakes.

It took some effort to draw up a list of 16 Minneapolis lakes, or, to be more precise, lakes and other notable bodies of water.

Personal Space in Economy

I love to fly, even in Economy. Fellow passengers are almost always considerate, showing respect for personal space. They might even have interesting stories to tell.

My Kagoshima: Getting Around the Region

Navigating Japan is not for the faint-hearted. Most overseas visitors arrive in Tokyo, only to enter a world of alphabets they cannot read, streets with non-consecutive house numbers, and train stations that are the world's busiest.

In my previous My Kagoshima posts:

I emphasized the need to "chunk it."

Kagoshima Prefecture is a manageable chunk of Japan that is as far as you can get from Tokyo by bullet train (910 miles, 1,464 km). 

I picked out three areas in Kagoshima Prefecture: Kagoshima City, Yakushima Island, and Kirishima (the Kirishima Volcanic Group section of Kirishima-Kinkowan National Park). 

I described how to get to Kagoshima Prefecture from the USA. 

I left you at Kagoshima Airport or Kagoshima City's main train station (Kagoshima-Chuo). Either way, the arrival is manageable: Kagoshima airport has 10 gates, Kagoshima-Chuo has 14 platforms.

In this post I describe how to get from the airport or train station to the three areas of Kagoshima I selected.

Urban Bike: Yard Art in a Civil Society

I see things from my bicycle I don't see from a bus or car. 

It might be an old guy on his bicycle, stovepipe hat, bushy beard, archaic black clothes, a character from a Dickens novel. Or a bearded guy cycling the Midtown Greenway in a girlie dress. 

They seek attention, or inhabit an alternate reality, or express art. I'm fine with any of that.

"Did you see that?" a cyclist asks politely as he speeds past me.

It's not just the fellow cyclists who enrich my cycling experience. I get to take in all the individuality around me, including the yards in front of people's homes. 

I'd like to tell stories of three of those yards, including the yard of one of the bearded cyclists I mentioned at the top of this post.  

A Field by the River Thames

An unassuming meadow on a sunny day in October 2014.

I had gone out of my way to walk across this field. Earlier that day I had traveled to the town of Staines, a short distance from London's Heathrow Airport. Next morning I would catch a flight to Athens, Greece, the cradle of democracy.

After checking in to an old inn set on the River Thames, I followed a path along the river. At Runnymede I walked across this field.

Urban Bike: Car-Free Minneapolis Bridges

Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge. 

Below me sixteen lanes of traffic roar.

I'm standing on the Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge, one of many Minneapolis bridges I cannot cross in a car. The bridge takes me between two parks: Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and Loring Park.

Loring Park.

In Loring Park, the zig-zag approach to this old bridge tells me I'm welcome on foot, not bicycle. Better to dismount.

Sometimes I cross bridges where both cyclists and pedestrians are not welcome: bridges with defaced no-trespassing signs, low guard rails, no guard rails, live rail track, gaps between rotting and fire-damaged boards.