Updated: April 18th
With each year, things become improved and refined. It is hard for me to still fathom that on March 27, 2008 I celebrated the 15th year of my ministry. Never in my wildest dreams would I ever imagined that I would have done so much and experienced all of the highs and lows in emotions that I have for the past 15 years. Because of some new develpments, I thought that I would try and make a itinerary and schedule for this upcoming trip. On February 12th, I made the above picture of my tentative route for this year's main mission trip. I got on the road from Americus, Georgia on Monday, March 03rd. I'll explain how I created the above picture in a little while.

I am really looking forward to how my new recumbent handles the Rocky Mountains. The EASY RACER / SUN - EZ-Speedster-AX handled the Appalachian Mountain Range in New Hampshire, Vermont, Virginia, and West Virginia pretty well last year. I will be climbing up to 9,426 feet (2,873 meters) above sea level at RABBIT EARS PASS and 10,276 feet (3,132 meters) above sea level at CAMERON PASS in Colorado NorthWest of Denver. I've done this section of Colorado several times and I really enjoyed riding along the CACHE LA POUDRE RIVER is flowing and there is a lot of white water kayaying and rafting. On a sidenote, I've come across a really good webpage that talks about the HISTORY OF RECUMBENTS . I didn't know that the first real modern recumbent was built in 1896 in Europe. Also, my rear wheel has been strengthened with stronger spokes so I hope that I will not have the problem with broken spokes that I had last year. If you are ever in Nw Illinois and riding along the GREAT RIVER TRAIL and need some bike repair, please stop at ARNOLD's BIKES in Thomson, Illinois since they will do a good job in repairing and servicing your bicycle or recumbent.

When I started this revision of this page, my thoughts are racing through my head (it could have been since I was up for about 33 straight hours without sleep) and I'm trying to find the right words to put down. I cannot imagine what my life would be right now if I hadn't heeded what I could say was a special commandment to do something that EL ELYON (the CREATOR OF ALL) wanted me to do. I've always been a person who thought outside of the box and lived a life that seemed to be out of step or "against the flow" of modern day society. I guess it could have been because of my up-bringing (or sort of lack of up-bringing) through my teen-age years and into my early twenties. I had to be pretty adaptive since I didn't get much support from my family (especially after I had accepted THE MESHIAH (MESSIAH)). My German heritage makes me want to accomplish a lot of things and stick onto something even though there seems to be such high odds that would cause failure and most everybody else would have quit a lot sooner than I would.

What would my life be now if I hadn't headed out from Portland, Oregon in that snow storm back on February 19th of 1993? What would my life be like if I had actually turned around and headed back to Portland after just traveling those twenty miles through the slush and snow? What would have happened if EL ELYON (the CREATOR OF ALL) hadn't provided me that ride across the coastal mountain range at the right moment when I was thinking about turning around? What would my life be now if I hadn't headed out from the Santa Monica, California around noon on March 27th not caring if I would ever get access to what remained in my savings account back in Portland, how I would ever get any extra money to survive on, where I would get the food to replenish what meager supplies I had on the bike already, getting much needed replacement tires and tubes, etc.? Would have I found a way to survive in the Santa Monica - Los Angelies area or would have I found a way for me to get back to Portland, Oregon where a job with Catholic Social Services as a caseworker was waiting for me?

When I attended the service at the First Presbyterian Church in Americus, Georgia on February 10th, I was given sort of a confirmation of my mission by the RUACH HA KOIDESH (HOLY SPIRIT). The response to the Benediction at the end of the service was the corus refrain from "Hear I AM, L-RD" that was written by Daniel L. Shutte that was composed and copyrighted in 1981 after he read Genesis 46:2 (a response of YAA'KOV (Jacob) after EL ELYON (the CREATOR OF ALL) gave him a vision for Israel. The chorus refrain is "Here I am, L-Rd. Is it I, L-RD? I have heard you calling in the night. I will go, L-RD, if you lead me. I will hold your people in my heart.

I can say truthfully that EL ELYON (the CREATOR OF ALL) provided for my needs these past fifteen years. Not in the way that I had expected but in different unexpected ways. For some reasons that I'm still trying to figuere out, I haven't gotten the recognition of having a viable ministry from other churches and ministries. With a good majority of the ministers I come in contact, once they hear that I'm travelling around the country on two-wheels they automatically make false judgements on my like I am a transient and I am just out to get as much stuff as I can from people. That is far from the case. I have never and never will ask for one penny to support myself. I am quite content with living off of the money that people have thrown away or lost. Last year, the amount of money that I found was almost $160.

Money is being donated to my ministry but it is never asked for (donations have to be of "Free-Will" offerings of the giver) and the amount last year was a little over $3,100. Along with this was a little over $8,500 in in-kind donations like bike repairs (or discounts on repairs), bike supplies, food, meals, and lodging. With regards to these in-kind donations, I got more help from non-church sources than from churches. When it came to churches, I usually just asked for permission to either pitch my tent in the back of their property or in case of bad or cold weather to be able to sleep inside the church somewhere usually in the fellowship hall or a Sunday school classroom. I am willing and have done in the past stopped to work someplace doing odd-jobs but I will not ask for a set wage but will rely on that person's judgement on how much they are willing to give me for the work that I've done for them. Everything needs to be "free-will" in nature since I do not want to violate the "FAITH COVENENT that I made with EL ELYON (the CREATOR OF ALL) .

There are a lot of things that I'm going to do differently. With the last 16 mission trips, I didn't really have a set route or schedule to keep. I had a vague idea where I was to go but I never fully mapped it out and I rode as far as I could in one direction until I felt led to change my route or something else help change the route for me. One of the hardest things to get accomplished was finding places to stay when the weather was bad or cold and I couldn't find a place to pitch my tent. Usually, I put in long days on the bike and either got into town around mid-day or around dusk. At those times, it was extremely difficult to connect with a local chaplain or minister. These long days were expecially hard on the road if I didn't know anybody in the cities and towns that I stopped in or had already made prior arrangements. With the past trips, I did a lot of zig-zagging and the recrossing of states. Also, there were a lot of times when I rode maybe two or three weeks without being able take at least a half or full-day off the road to recover and rest. These things are not going to be the norm this year.

Thanks the graciousness of a good friend in Texas, I have a laptop to travel around with also software that will give me the opportunity to actually sit down way in advance and plan a route to follow. Last week, I actually took the time to make up the route and the map on this page shows it. I also came up with TENTATIVE TIME SCHEDULE . For people who want to follow along visually, here is the INDEX FOR SNAPSHOTS (sections) of the map. This route and schedule is not really set into stone. It can and might be changed by many factors. I had already made corrections of the route and posted changes to it on March 02. Because of this, the map snapshots will not correspond very well to the tentative route and schedule. When I have time along the way, I will make corrected map snapshots and post them. One of the things is the major tornadoes that hit the Central and Western Parts of Tennessee Tuesday, February 05th. I went through the area to see if there is anything that I can do to help out in the recovery effort but I really didn't see any damage in the Jackson, Tennessee area. There is really no way for me at this time to ride through all of the five states that were hit by tornadoes that day. For ministers or directors of social service agencies, here is an INDEX for Letters of Reference.

In the schedule, I've given myself quite a few days off the road. In the past trips, there have been times when I rode two or three weeks straight without taking any time off (even if it was just a half-day off). I pretty well set the schedule up so that I will not ride on a Sunday. This will give me a set schedule of six days on the road and one day off. I've also made sure that I will not be doing those high mileage weeks that I've been doing in the past trips. I am not going to try and do between five hundred and six hundred miles per week. Most of the days will be in the 40 mile range and I plan to be in a town by early afternoon so that I can check out if there are any social ministries that I can help out with or get to a church to see if somebody could help me find simple lodging. This doesn't mean if the need arises, I will extend the day's ride up to one hundred miles or more if I need to make an appointment or something special is going to happen.

Now that I've route set up, I will be doing some advance planning in trying to contact some churches in the towns that I will be riding through and give them advance notice of my imminent arrival into their area. I plan to do this week and the following week. Hopefully, this will make my trip more pleasureable and I will not have as many problems as I have had in the past trips. Some pastors that I know around the United States have offered to write me "Letters of Reference". I'll be carrying these in a portfolio but I will also post them on the website as pdfs. Already, I have stops in cities and towns set up because I know ministers in those cities and towns or I have friends there.

As the mission trip progresses, I will be updating information on this website. If I had the privilege of speaking at either a church or ministry, I will be posting it HERE . When the trip actually starts, I will post an actual TRIP LOG . This log is Point to Point meaning a Starting Point to Finishing Point for each day traveled. The town names might not always reflect the real stopping and starting points for each day's travel. Sometimes the names of the towns reflect the closest place (within three miles) to where I camped out. Also, this route log is not broken down by year segments or trips. With the use of the "Tentative Route" and the actual "Trip Log" you will actually see the differences between what I thought that I would ride and what I actually did. The TRIP LOG is current to April 18th.

Any NEWSPAPER ARTICLES will be posted. As with the previous trips, I will be posting TRIP UPDATES , I switched over to posting "Updates from the Road" the end of 2000 instead of posting "Stories from the Road". Updates are posted every week or two weeks. I posted the first update for the year back near the beginning of January. The latest update for the year was posted on April 18th. The next Update will be posted between April 25th and May 02nd.

Here is how I made the picture at the top of the page on my Tentative Route. A friend of mine suggested that I come up with another picture of where I've ridden. In the past, I normally drew a map free-hand using MICROSOFT PAINT , which is a pre-installed accessory of the operating system and using it as a sketchpad to draw a line on a master map graphic and then updating that image as the trip progresses. I decided to try another route. On my laptop, I have the 2006 version of Microsoft STREETS AND TRIPS .

STREETS AND TRIPS is a pretty good piece of software and is pretty easy to use. It has many great features and allows you to type in a street address in any town or city in the country and it will show you a map of it and it also has a Route PLANNING function that will allow you to make an actual route. The program is intended to be used by motorists but I've learned how to use it to plan my bike trips or portions of trips when I have to get through an area where I've never been in. I use it alongside a regular state highway road map. The setting of STREETS and TRIPS goes between a view of 22,500 miles in space looking down upon the Earth to a relative height of one mile above the Earth. I like to set the program to "terrain made" and 1,250 miles above the Earth. The program can show routes in the form of a "regular road map", "terrain map", "road map for viewing at night", and also a "political map". In "Terrain Mode", you can get the sense of elevation.

Once I got the route mapped out, I made 50 snapshots of the route and used the "Copy Map" feature of the Edit function and copied each snapshot into the editing window of PAINT and turned them into bitmaps. Using the Sketch/Skew function in the Image Window of PAINT, I reduced each bitmap to around 24% and layered all of the bitmaps into one picture like what you would do when you are putting a puzzle together. This is pretty well what a cartographer would do when they are making a new map.I found it easier to use PAINT in the Invert Colors mode and found it so much easier to use than to try and put the pieces together with the normal colors. The resulting picture looks like something a satellite would have taken if it was in geo-stationary orbit over the United States. It reminds me of photos that I've seen of the country that was taken in the ultra-violent light spectrum to see the different forms of vegetation. When I showed the finished picture to a friend, he said that it reminded him of pictures of the country taken at night and you could see the bright lights where the cities are around the country.

I did further pixel manipulation using PAINT and PAINT.NET to digitally edit the image to clean it up. To make the whole country to stand out, I used the pixel manipulation tools to erase Canada, Mexico, and the major bodies of water that surround the country. In total, it took about 21 hours to make with the tools that I have access to and it's almost magazine quality and it looks like I used professional graphic editing software.

In the above picture, I think that my route stands out so much better in this photo than if I had shown it in regular color mode. My route would have been just a faint green line at the settings that I used and it would have been hard to see. You can see the route as a bluish-pink line. It's almost like I had a light source fastened to the back of my recumbent and the satellite had taken multiple-exposures of the country and put them together. The small pinkish square dot near the SE corner of the picture right above where the Florida Panhandle starts in the location of Americus, Georgia, which is where I am starting and ending the trip. I also think that this picture is one of the best graphic images that I've created and I've learned so much in the creation of it. If I have any time during what time I have left before I get on the road, I'll try and post the indivual snapshots.

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