When you think of bike friendly cities in the United States, Portland, Oregon, usually is at or near the top of the list. So it’s hard to believe that this city that’s widely known by its airport code (PDX) lacks a travel guide specifically for cyclists.

And yet, when local cycling advocates Meghan Sinnott and Elly Blue were organizing the 2008 Towards Carfree Cities conference, they found they lacked a single, convenient resource to send attendees who—quite reasonably—wanted to know how to best approach Portland on two wheels.

The duo gathered the info, and since then, the say they’ve been getting requests for the info from PDX-bound travelers several times a week. The goal now is to publish PDX by Bike: Your Guide to Discovering Portland by Bicycle, and to have a continuously updated companion website.

This does seem like an ideal project for Kickstarter, which is a way of crowdsourcing the funding for creative endeavors. (If this sounds familiar, it’s because Liz Lewis has covered Kickstarter here a few times before, most notably when it was used to successfully fund The Global Citizen Project.)

PDX by Bike has but a modest budget: $2,000 for art and cover printing costs. If you pledge anything over $5 you get the guide. As is Kickstarter’s wont, there are escalating goodies with increased pledge amounts. The apogee $500 pledge gets you the bike guide, The Zinester’s Guide to Portland,  a waterproof Bike There! map or Walk There! book, a bag of locally-roasted coffee, and a custom guided tour of Portland with Meghan and Elly for two, which includes bikes and meals for the day. (Get a sense of what that a jolly day that would be.)

The pledge deadline is April 29th, 2011 at 4pm Eastern.  That’s nine days from today, so head over to Kickstarter to help make this one happen.

It’s not easy staying green while traveling, especially if, like me, you like nothing better than hopping into a car and driving off into the distance.

I love road trips. I think it’s in my blood. By the time I was 5, I had been across the States twice. Since then, road tripping has become something of a compulsion.

But these days, with concerns about the environment and the skyrocketing price of gasoline, road trips aren’t looking quite so appealing.

Still, it’s hard to resist something that makes you feel so good.

So, here I am, once again, making plans for a road trip, this time a 2 two week trip around Southern California at the end of the month.

Only this time, I’m looking at it from a green perspective. Along with planning where to go and what to see, I’ve also been researching ways to make this road trip as green as possible.

Here’s what I’ve come up with so far.

1. Choose your car carefully. Renting a hybrid will save on gas which is good for the environment and your wallet. But unfortunately, the cost of renting a hybrid is often more than a regular car.

2. Join the Better World Club, which is similar to the AAA but greener. Their maps highlight the most energy efficient and, often scenic, byways. Better World Club also offers gas rebates, deals on eco-friendly rentals, and a chance for you to purchase carbon offsets to balance your road trips emissions.

3. Increase fuel efficiency by keeping the tires inflated, not driving like a Nascar driver, parking in the shade wherever possible, and believe it or not, turning left less. Apparently turning left takes longer and wastes more gas than turning right.

4. Pack lightly. The more weight in the car, the more gas that will be used. Makes sense. Also pack a tote bag or two for your shopping expeditions and a few re-usable food containers, utensils, and cups. This will save you from having to accept non-recyclable bags, throwaway cups and even takeout containers.

5. Stay green. Look for accommodation that practice eco-friendly initiatives. Start looking before you leave home, using directories such as the Green Hotels Association or the Green Travel Hub. Or, if you’re feeling flush, there’s always Forbes Traveller’s America’s Greenest Hotels to check out.

6. Eat green.  Use guides such Sustainable Tables Eat Well Guide to locate healthy eateries, natural grocery stores, and farmers’ markets.

7. Charge green. Not talking about the dreaded plastic card here, although there are some credit card companies that are greener than others (note to self – look into this more). I’m actually talking about investing in a solar charger to keep all your digital electronics – camera, phone, iPod, laptop – in working

Of course, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

There’s plenty more that you can do to make any road trip, or for that matter, any trip, be it road, train, or plane, more environmentally friendly.

Let me know what you think and please, leave a comment with any good tips that you have.

Just north of Mendocino on the Northern California coast is Glass Beach, one of the most unique beaches in the world.

But it’s uniqueness is not from nature but from man. That’s because this beach was once the Fort Bragg City Dump.

Everything from spark plugs and engine blocks to china and glass was dumped here from 1949 until 1967 when it was finally decided that perhaps dumping garbage at the water’s edge wasn’t such a good idea after all.

Three decades on, nature has reclaimed the beach. The constantly pounding surf has transformed trash into treasure, resulting in the beach displaying shiny layers of polished broken glass in a kaleidoscope of shapes and colors.

Yes, there still is the occasional rusty spark plug but mostly it’s the glass sparkling in the sun that catches everyone’s eye.

Now part of MacKerricher State Park, Glass Beach makes for an interesting living science lesson with not only it’s trashy beginnings but also because of it’s ever changing tide pools that are home to crabs, mollusks, and aquatic plants.

(photo by Shiny Things)

It’s been one of those weeks; started out pretty mellow, not that much going on, then went bonkers.

The kind of week when you thought you had life under control, but by Thursday you cannot imagine hanging on until the weekend.

The weekend that will be totally stuffed with holiday festivities that are ALL scheduled on the same Saturday. Shoot me now.

Or put me on a plane to Kauai ….

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A demure woman prepares for a cooking demonstration at the Rundle Street Mall in Adelaide, Australia.

Her modest, long-sleeved brown and blue checked dress and her center-parted and feathered hair are picture-perfect late 1970s housewife — which makes sense, since it is 1981. She’s got a microphone to help raise her voice over the cheery mall music, and soon she’s ready to begin the creation of Murray River Punch.

“One of the most wonderful things about this beverage is you don’t have to buy anything much,” she says, as she busies herself over a portable gas burner.  She starts with deoxidized water, and then, using the exact cooking show patois and intonation that recalls Julia Child, calls for the next ingredient.

“A quarter cup of human urine,” she says.

“Just collect a bit of human urine and set it aside. To complement that, you should have some human feces. Here we are. Collect it in the morning…wrap it up to keep it fresh. So in that goes. Right. Now, chop it up…like so. As you know, sewage goes straight into the water so this is really quite an important ingredient to get the full effect, the taste of the punch. Mix it up with the hand blender. You can use an electric blender for doing this, too of course. But for public demonstrations I’ve found it much too noisy.”

And so it goes on, with the woman — actually, the experimental artist Bonita Ely — adding toilet paper  (“you don’t have to shred it or anything like that, as you know, toilet paper is very absorbent”),  fertilizer (“two tablespoons of fertilizer should do it, I should think. It’s an important addition of flavors to the drink”), European carp which were introduced into the river and became invasive, lots of salt, chemicals and insecticide. (“If you want to make this drink even more interesting, add a defoliant, like Agent Orange for instance. But I think we’ll just stick to the insecticide today.”)  And then she’s done.

“Oh, my mouth is just absolutely watering,” she says. “It looks absolutely wonderful.”

I saw stills of this performance in Melbourne last month at the Ian Potter Centre at the National Gallery of Victoria, part of the museum’s permanent collection of contemporary work, much of which had a strong political theme. (If you’re not getting to Melbourne any time soon,  watch and listen to the work here.)  Ely’s been following this troubled  South Australian river since 1977, and released a series of photographs in 2008 and from a time of drought in 2009.

You can talk about river pollution in terms of sediment, run-off, invasive foreign species and other abstractions for hours and hours, but nothing makes you understand the issue quite as well as watching how a particular river got that way — and contemplating the results in a decorative punch bowl, elegantly garnished with rabbit dung.

On Earth Day 2010, this Thursday, have a drink (of something else) to that.