I've tried to tell the public about "how to win the oil war" via newspaper interviews, quit counting after 30 (some sort of Guiness World Record for most stories about the same idiot on the red bike), but at least with MBer's you don't have to explain the "freedom to move" aspect, when I did the Denver trip it was to prove you could see America for $10 a day, and that was back in the $2.50 a gallon days.

But it is the "stoopid" ideas that are the most fun to relate to fellow bike enthusiasts.

For instance, I left Denver at dawn, headed south to Colorado Springs, observing ominous clouds coming over Pikes Peak (more about those clouds later), then east ("next gas station 97 miles")....then south toward La Junta, where I arrived around 5 pm.

I always gassed up and got water before finding my camping spot, sun setting over my shoulder, I headed east toward Lamar.

There was a wildlife refuge on my state of Colorado map. midway to Lamar, that looked good for camping. It was about 2 miles off the highway, and when I pulled onto the 'flatter than a pancake' dirt road, I saw this HUGE prairie dog village on the left.

What the heck, I pulled off the road and start rousting the critters, and within a half mile I have about a hundred of them running out in front of me. At about 15-20 miles per hour, I'm having NO trouble dodging the holes, and I'm laughing and zig zagging all the way to the entrance of the refuge.

On the entrance sign is a big old picture of a rattlesnake and I says to myself "another 90 minutes till sundown, think I'll keep heading east"....but instead of going back on the dirt road, I proceed to see how many prairie dogs I can get stampeding on the way back out to the highway.

At least 500, I was rounding up the leftovers from my first pass thru, and riding this brown wave of barking, mad as tarnation varmits, I'm thinking to myself "Billy the Kid would have done THIS if a only horses legs weren't vulnerable." Some of them were chasing ME, I'm remembering the Ewoks.

So I figure I'm the first person to "do the prairie dog surf", give some wicked ideas to our compadres in the high chapperel.....

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