Pretty interesting how your mind works.  And here I just replaced the duct tape holding your car's bumper together!

Glad to hear that, but have you cleaned up from those nasty squirrels yet?

It rained so now everything is fine.  Car looks great again.  I will still wash it sometime and vacuum up the mess inside that you guys left!   I'm sure this is the right place to have this discussion.

Glad you enjoyed it, John. That's some story about your friend. It must be cool to see the trail from the air.

I wrote a book about my first tour from Boston to Bar Harbor. I included the map, pictures, and wrote it in sort-of a "you, too, can do this" adventure. At the time, Apple had an iBook creation software to write and publish books so I took advantage of that. If you have Apple iBooks on your iPad/Laptop, you can download the book and read it from http://books.apple.com/us/book.... Best of all, I just changed the price to $0 as of this morning. So, happy reading!

To this point, I have certainly been a collector of 'stuff'. Part of that 'stuff' used to be oodles and oodles of bike parts and components that I had changed for one reason or other, but just did not have the heart to part with, just 'in case' I needed it at some indeterminate time in the future.

Until this year (I think we all know why... grrrr) my annual winter trip to Cuba meant not only a bit of time on the beach, some tropical bicycle jaunts (if I brought my bike with me) or sipping on the odd mojito, but also bringing down clothing and meds to gift... and those collected bike parts. Tires, rims, tubes, handlebars, derailleurs, panniers... I was pleased to gift and pleased to finally have someone put these things to use where I was often told, "In Cuba, your throwaway is our gold." I made people happy, and through them, I was happy.

Back to being a stuff-keeper. I have many, many, many books. I love their feel, their smell, their look. I love to read them. But generally only once. Among this library of books are the cycle touring genre. I loved them but will likely never re-read them. Thank you for posting your idea. I am going to do something similar!

I'm busy reading Dervla Murphy's  "South From The Limpopo" which I have borrowed from a friend and I'm loving it.  I'm not in a position to own any books (being a  "homeless" permanent traveller) but if I weren't I would love to get my hands on the books.  I would like to suggest that whoever does get the books decides to recycle them through the cycle touring community once they have read them.