Somewhere in Kansas there's a woman on a green recumbent bike...

I got a postcard from Kansas today. This is how my friend Judy is spending her vacation: she's on a bike ride, alone, traveling 850 miles from Colorado City to St. Louis. The trip is part of her ambitious plan to bike all the way across the United States in stages. She's doing it in stages. Her previous vacation got as far as St. Louis - she decided to do this next leg west-to-east, since Colorado is mostly uphill from Kansas.

There aren't a lot of hotels or restaurants in the eastern plains of Colorado, so on her lime green recumbent bike (handmade to her specifications by the same guy who rigged a catchment water system on her roof) she packed a lot of trail mix and energy bars and a kind of sleeping bag I'd never heard of:

A Bivouac is a lightweight sack or bag which is an excellent choice if you do not want to take a rest or spend the night inside a tent. Also called a bivi bag or bivi sack, a Bivouac is usually used by minimalist campers and mountaineers, and for solo trips.

I can't help worrying about her - but I guess if she's gotten as far as St. Louis, she can go the distance. Judy's the toughest woman I know. Her other vacation project: climbing to the highest point in each state. (I think she's done about 40 of them, including Alaska. The lowest one was Florida, a mere 400 feet above sea level.) She raised three sons pretty much by herself in a converted tobacco barn without running water. Three little boys, winter, an outhouse - think about it.

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