Kansas and Colorado

Trying to catch up in our blogging, but still a few days behind. Enjoy a recap of earlier this week!

Sunday, July 10th - We’ve made it to Utah. Moab/Arches NP/Canyonlands NP to be specific. But we will recap a bit. Kansas has been, by far, the most exhilarating state on this trip. From the stellar views to the treacherous rock scrambles, we cherished every minute of this so often trivialized landscape. Okay, so Kansas was no Utah, but it was Alyssa’s dream destination. On the road from Andover, cruising on veggie down scenic Route 28, Alyssa couldn’t hold it in. “I can’t wait for Kansas,” she would repeatedly holler. And believe me, when we finally made it to one of America’s most pristine tourist destinations, she was not disappointed in the least. Farms, cows, corn, dragons, haystacks, and tractors of course- everything little kids dream of- were visible from I-70. Additionally, Kansas displays the many ways of extraction by which America musters up its energy. Oil rigs and coal mines were commonplace throughout our midwest drive, but Kansas also showed off its high tech green technology in the form of wind turbines and solar panels. And as you can guess, Alyssa, the budding environmentalist as termed by Bill Fahey himself at Andover High School’s 2011 graduation ceremony, simply lost herself as her eyes were confronted with such evidence of a sustainability in our country. Never having witnessed hundreds of wind turbines outside of GreenPeace’s most recent promotional DVD, Alyssa came to the realization that driving a veggie car is not the only way to go green. All the while I sat in the passenger seat wondering, what will this girl do next? There is really no telling. Veggie powered airplanes? Veggie powered computers? Alyssa waited over a week before purchasing new batteries for her headlamp- did she plan on converting that to run on veggie oil too? Only time will tell. We arrived at Cedar Bluff State Park around 11:30. Unable to locate the campsite that we less than barely paid the bare minimum for, we pitched our tents right along the lake with all the other RVs and gas guzzling vehicles, boats in tow. Every time Alyssa sees a diesel vehicle, she howls “convert it!” at the top of her lungs. Last night, Thomas thought he heard a dog outside our tent in Arches’ backcountry; he was relieved to find that Alyssa had heard a diesel truck on the main road and climbed to the top of the adjacent canyon to yell “convert it,” using her veggie oil funnel as a voice projection mechanism. Anyway, Kansas was memorable; playing on rows of hay barrels, brewing chi tea at midnight and packing it all up as fast as the water boiled when we thought a killer bear was roaming the corn field, and driving in a straight line for five hours are all moments of this trip that will stay with us for a lifetime. Remember Dorothy? We didn’t see her, but we adopted a pet fly, Toto, who stayed in our car for quite some time. When we hit Colorado, we kicked him out. Actually, we fried him in veggie oil. Either way, we made it to Colorado.

Alyssa: When we crossed the border into Colorado, we were surprised, to say the least. Although we were finally getting our hopes up to be leaving the flat, endless fields of Kansas to ascend up into the grand mountains of Colorado, the scenery didn’t change one bit. It turns out east Colorado looks the same as Kansas for a solid hundred miles. Cool.

Soon enough, we were in Denver. Although I had wanted to see the city, I was concerned about finding waste vegetable oil that we could take. Most of the people I knew running on WVO had told me that Denver is one of the hardest cities to find grease in, since there are a lot of biodiesel companies already picking it up regularly. We parked the car near Colfax Ave after some advice from a man selling fried catfish out of an ice-cream truck. Kyle and Thomas took one side of Colfax, a main road concentrated with restaurants, while I took the other. After about three hours on a wild grease chase - walking over forty blocks, asking dozens of managers for grease, being denied or being allowed to check rancid or empty dumpsters, and getting rained on, Kyle finally found a nearly full fifty-five gallon drum of good quality grease that we were allowed to take. It sounded too good to be true after such a hard day of searching. Unfortunately, it was too good to be true. In order to access the drum, the executive chef of the restaurant next door had to move his brand new Porsche. He agreed to do so if he could get out of the kitchen before the 7:00 dinner rush. It was 6:30 at the time, so we decided to wait behind the restaurants... and we waited... and waited... and waited. Trying not to be rude, we didn’t bother the hostess or chef of the restaurant next door, so every hour or so we snuck out of the dark alley and peered around the corner to see if the restaurant was still open. Around 11:30 pm, the customers sitting on the patio seemed really sketched out by our sketchy spying, so we decided to take a late night drive to other restaurants that were suggested to us.

Our night in Denver continued to be long and frustrating. When the chef finally pulled away long after his restaurant closed, the grease we started taking seemed too liquid and too clear to be good quality. Denver had gotten so much rain that the streets had flooded the day before, and we were concerned that there was water in this pot of gold that we had waited so long for. We called it a night after grabbing ten gallons of the most likely contaminated grease, but it was too late at night (or early in the morning) to drive an hour to Boulder, where we were planning on sleeping. We put our backup plan into effect and slept in our car on a residential street a few blocks off Colfax.

K-note: Our gang awoke on 13th and Moccasin, a residential drive a few blocks from Colfax. Sleeping in a car is not bad, as long as you aren’t using cubes of grease as pillows or ottomans- but we don’t bother with that vegetable oil stuff anyway... Our previous night’s grease hunt resumed as quickly as Thomas pulls out his “survival” knife in self defense at the sight of a chipmunk.

A. Solo - We ended up getting grease from Chipotle (a feat in itself for being from a corporate restaurant chain) and another Mexican restaurant. Before we left Denver, my pump to collect and filter grease stopped working abruptly. Yes, another problem, and a significant one at that, if we wanted to keep collecting grease. Having had enough frustration in Denver, we dumped the grease that we suspected had water in it, got on the road and headed to Moab, UT. In Grand Junction, I tried switching the fuse on the pump, but no luck in getting it to work. I had to check the ground and power connection of the circuit, but needed an extra car battery to do that, so we drove to NAPA Auto Parts, where Austin generously helped us troubleshoot in return for a detailed explanation of my veggie system. My ground and power were fine, so it was the pump that needed to be replaced. The certain pump that I needed is not very common; there was one in Salt Lake City and another on the coast of California, so we decided to order it ourselves online, using the public library for internet. After some finagling and favors, we had it set so that the pump would be shipped to a bike shop in Moab, UT in three to five days. To be continued...