day 78 - 45 km
Cremona - Piacenza
From Piacenza, with an overcast sky after breakfast, we drive back to Cremona, the town where we left the tree bike yesterday, with sixty-two thousand inhabitants so we are told by mayor Andrea Virgilio, who gives us a warm welcome at the beautiful city hall. The tree bike is around the corner and we walk there together to take a picture, after we tell him the story of Circle4Change. He is enthusiastic and wants to participate. We agree to send the newsletter. It is around noon when we leave Cremona’s central square with the tree bike and Daan and Sanne on our regular bikes. Slowly out of town, across the long bridge and then suddenly total peace and quiet. Over a dike through the countryside, what a great contrast. Because a little further on they are asphalting the bike path on the embankment we have to make a detour and that gives us the opportunity to visit another town hall. Comune Monticelli with Gimmi Distante as mayor. They are actually closed but the mayor is there and kindly speaks to us, and with him too we take a picture by the tree. We drive on, back to the trail, and cross the impressive Po River over a long bridge and then follow the river for miles along the embankment. Here and there we hand out a small tree. It’s almost a meditative ride this way along the slowly winding bike path that floats through the landscape elevated on the dike. The wind is warm with fresh gusts, very pleasant. Again we cross the bridge to enter Piacenza. In the central historic square we meet a whole group of students having summer school, which includes students from the TU from Delft. We take a group photo by the tree and hand out leaflets and two birthday trees. Again, very enthusiastic reactions. That remains very nice. It is around four o’clock when we arrive at our accommodation. Deliciously on time. That doesn’t happen very often. Tomorrow morning Sanne is going away for a week and the next day Yka will join us for at least a week so we will be four, which is handy for logistics and of course very cozy.
di July 22 - day 79
Today is a non-cycling day. The tree bike is standing very quietly next to the house here in Piacenza where we are staying for a few nights. I find it difficult to tell whether the tree is feeling well or not, whether we are watering too little or too much, even though we have a sensor system that transmits the moisture percentages of the root ball. The day has flown by, especially with emails sent. I have resolved to send to all our contacts on the line, municipalities and stakeholders, our English newsletter with a personal touch. And that takes time, a lot of time. But I think it is worthwhile and a good way to build our Circle4Change family. With Foppe de Haan (IVN) this morning we went over the approach how we can best approach the ‘European Voices of Nature’, two voices per country we are thinking about. And that is: we would like to get a better grip on what we see and experience in the landscape through ‘voices of nature’. What is going on, what is going well and what is going wrong, and why? And for that, looking as objectively as possible in the longer term is important. For example, if we have the story of the “bee” told by a “bee,” it is fascinating to know how it was fifty years ago and what new problems the bees are facing now, how those problems arose, and what, according to the bees, can be done about it. It will be quite a job to make it understandable and accessible to everyone in a playful way, but I think that is very important to make the “European Voices of Nature” exciting and successful. In any case, we are going to make an attempt. It is a quiet evening, we cook our own dinner inside because even at this time of the day it is still very warm outside. Richard has taken care of the bookings for the coming week and Daan has put the financial administration back in order. It’s all part of the job. Everyone has their own tasks and it goes smoothly.
Wed, July 23 - day 80
Today our second non-cycling day. Tomorrow we cycle again, towards Rea and Pavia. In addition to the many emails and calls, we talked about the Circle4Change finances. Because the grant applications we made to several funds this spring proved unsuccessful, we are over ten percent short of the budget. And we are talking about more than twenty-five thousand euros. We deliberately color outside the lines with our project and that is very difficult for the funds, which leads to cancellations. Even though we carefully meet all the conditions. We have now drawn up a list of opportunities for additional funding which we are now going to look at one by one. From drawing attention again to our crowdfunding (€ 40,-/kilometer) to targeted sponsorship, i.e. looking for parties that have an interest in our story and our way of working on this special Tour. It remains a puzzle but it is part of such a project that has never been done before, here too we have to invent the wheel a bit ourselves. This morning Daan and Richard had the bikes repaired so now all the bikes work again. And this afternoon Richard picked up Yka from the airport, she will cycle with us for at least a week. Very cozy. It is nine o’clock in the evening and still over thirty degrees. We ate a stuffed rice salad. The trees have had a lot of water and the tree bike also drinks about ten liters of water every night. Tomorrow the caravan will move on again. The past two non-cycling days do us good and at the same time we still do a lot of arranging. We toast to Marga, Daan’s girlfriend who has her birthday today. Sleep well later.