We learned about an exciting event, right in our town: a whole group of Hampshire College students bicycled across the United states to support and learn about co-ops. They arrived to their final destination – Amherst – on September 1st, and folks here put up an outdoor reception to greet them upon completing their journey. See more information on their website.

All happened as people planned. The tents went up, many co-ops and co-op friendly organizations were represented, including Transition Amherst, and we waited for the bicyclists to arrive.

They indeed arrived, right on the planned time too, and told us a tiny bit of their story. What grabbed me most was how much they learned about co-ops on the way, and how excited they were about it.

The welcoming event, for which here is a nicely designed flyer, generated other conversations as well. Organizations with similar goals connected during the three-hour festival, and many learned more about the strength of our community, to which co-ops add greatly. I learned about how interconnected that world is with organizations supporting the movement, individuals expressing a great amount of effort, uncompensated other than the feeling of belonging, a feeling that otherwise ran lower and lower in contemporary USA. And I learned more about how powerful young people are nowadays, while facing a world that, if anything, is even less hospitable than what I, twenty plus years their senior, grew up in.

Just to show how well connected we are becoming across all these community creating movement, I also learned, that they came through Viroqua Wisconsin, home of another group of transitioners, in which a dear friend of mine is participating with honorable amount of zest. From him I learned, that their community outreach event is coming up soon, in fact within a month from ours here in Amherst.

And since I am so enthused to show how bicycles can be used for cargo carrying, I took my trusty Yuba Mundo, and gave rides to people. In a later Amherst event, the block party called Celebrate Amherst several people came up to the Transition table recognizing me partially because I was the ‘one with the great big blue bike’.