Well, maybe a few of you folks are wondering what happened to the dashing duo, Guillermo and Amber. Did they arrive in Austin safely?  Have they made it back to California? Were they happy with their trip? Did they learn anything new from it? Has anything spectacular happened since then? The answers are...

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Our final farm visit for this round of Bike2Barn occurred in Lincoln, NM at Laughing Sheep Farms. Sally, third generation owner, has a successful country store, restaurant, and farm, all using farm-raised and grass-fed beef, elk, buffalo, lamb, and pork meats. In fact, Guillermo and I were treated to a delightful lunch of homemade cottage cheese (creamy and smooth), gourmet lamb and beef burgers served on homemade hatch chile buns, grilled cantaloupe, potato salad and coleslaw, and cranberry/apple iced tea (hungry yet?).

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The Dragoon Mountains, in Southern Arizona, is home to Stronghold Cattle Company, owned by Kevin Dumais. The Dragoon Mountain Ranch is at a 5000 foot elevation, located on 57,000 acres of pristine pastures, knobby hills, and rocky outcroppings. Cochise, the famed Chiricahua Apache Chief, and approximately 1000 of his people lived for 15 years in the natural fortress of the Dragoon Mountains, protected by 2 days of visibility. Eventually Cochise and his people were starved out by the US Army, and forced to sign a treaty for survival. As part of negotiations they were told that they could keep the land surrounding the Dragoon Mountains, but were instead shipped to Florida.

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The desert of Arizona has a jewel, an animal utopia named HoofsnHorns. It is a sanctuary, right outside of Tucson, for animals who have been abandoned in the desert, are in need of some serious TLC, or who were headed to the slaughterhouse. Their savior is a woman named Shelby, the animal rescuer, and she loves each and every one of her many animals as if they were her own children. To read more about the farm, please visit our album and enjoy the captions. To help Shelby and her cause, join a cow share program, adopt an animal, and visit her website.

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Where do I even begin? I guess the beginning is always a good place...

We drove down, down, down the Vallecito Mountains, entering the hot, dry weather of the Anza-Borrego desert. The ride was spectacular, with amazing vistas on the way down the windy, curvy one-lane road. If we could have talked to each other about it on the road, we would have commented on the lunar landscape, the changing temperature, the vastness of the Salton Sea, the sweat rolling down our backs. Instead, we looked ahead, and I daydreamed away to the tune of whatever was playing on my IPod.

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What luck we had! We called Helene and Robert Beck, searching intently for their farm, Beck Grove, at which we intended to drop in on an unannounced visit, and caught them just as they were leaving for a movie. One of the first things out of Helene's mouth was: "Where are you?, What are you doing tonight??".  My immediate thought was: "Could she be offering us a place to stay? Oh, please, oh, please."

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We're sitting at an old diner in Blythe, close to the Colorado river, which we are soon to cross on our way to Tucson, Arizona. We said goodbye to Doug Adair at Pato's Dream Date Gardens this morning, and headed towards the Chocolate Mountains in the morning cool. We haven't blogged in a few days, partly because of difficulty finding an Internet connection, and partly because we found a couple of farms where we felt very comfortable and welcome, just at the time when we felt like slowing down and taking a little bit of a break.

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The adventures continue, and the ride to Malibu to visit Vital Zuman Farms was no exception. A little about how Guillermo uses his motorcycle: he reset the trip odometer every time we fill the gas tank, so we know exactly how many miles we can go before running out of gas (around 240 miles). Well, Guillermo forgot to reset the odomenter immediately after adding gas the last time, so we miscalculated and ran out of gas on the Pacific Coast Highway (not a bad place to run out of gas, if you ask me). We were cruising along, I was cheerfully enjoying my iPod, singing along at the top of my lungs (a motorcycle helmet is a safe place for that), when all of the sudden Guillermo pulls over and informs me that we ran out of gas.

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A visit to Coleman Farms was more like an excuse to eat, get drunk, laugh, and enjoy good company. It's true. We were hardly working, and having tons of fun. It began with a mosey motorcycle drive to Carpinteria on Hwy 192, passing grand estate after grand estate, and just about as many luxury cars. We pulled into the drive that led to Coleman Farms, and it was lined with white picket fences, perfectly manicured lawns, and a dozen impeccably kept thoroughbred horses. I thought, for sure, that these were going to be some uppity people.

As we drove along a little further, the picket fences stopped and junk metal welded into art began to dot the drive. Then, a pig pen. Then, a couple of trailer homes, and then finally Bill and Dehlia Coleman's cozy home covered in overgrown everything.

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Fairview Gardens, established in 1997 by Michael Ableman, is a non-profit organization located in Goleta, California. It is a twelve and a half acre farm smack-dab in the middle of suburbia, neighboring a WellsFargo Bank and Rite-Aid Pharmacy. Originally it was created to preserve the land and grow nourishing food, but has since become a huge success and an integral part of the community. On the farm, they produce over one hundred varieties of vegetables and fruits, and they educate others through tours, gardening and cooking classes, internships, workshops, and more.
 

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