Leaving Amherst, Bill and I biked south towards Connecticut. As night came on the first day, we had to find a place to camp, and Bill suggested I ask at the fire station. For those of you who followed my journeys through Latin America, you know that I stayed at almost 40 fire stations across Latin America, simply because the firefighters would let me stay with them when I asked. I asked at the Wilbraham fire station if we could stay (I showed them my patches from many different fire stations across Latin America). No, I was told. It is against the rules.

Fortunately, while buying some food at a gas station, we met John Maconi, who offered us camping space behind his house, as well as a shower and some dinner (he left us a comment). While in the U.S. fire stations may have more rules and more worries about liability than in Latin America, it was good to see that strangers would still welcome Bill and me into their house.

Traveling on, Bill and I biked into Hartford Connecticut, where we gave a talk at at Alchemy Juice Bar, and then into New Haven, where we gave a talk at Yale University. We also appeared in the Greenwich Post and the Daily Hampshire Gazette.

From New Haven, we followed the Connecticut coast towards New York. I am still amazed by the size of U.S. houses in comparison to the houses I saw across Latin America — I remember a woman in the mountains in Peru, who lived in a three-walled hut, who asked me “Don’t you have nice houses in the U.S.?” I kept hearing that phrase as I biked. Houses in the U.S. are so comfortable.

Many of these houses in southern Connecticut, which are extremely comfortable, are built right along the shoreline, and it was hard not to have another sensation passing them: Any bit of sea level rise will damage or flood so much property here. For a discussion of how much sea level may rise, you can read a former post of mine.

After a night in Greenwich Connecticut at the house of Zaac, a bicycle tourist who found out about our project, a group of cyclists met us and guided us through secondary streets and into New York City.

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