Rocketrek Starts!

John writes from Oklahoma City:

Hey Marc,

The first Native American astronaut, John Herrington, will begin his transcontinental bicycle tour this coming week. His plans changed from earlier this year when he had thought he would begin in Sacramento. Now he will be starting at the west end of the Olympic Peninsula and following a roughly diagonal route across the lower 48 to Cape Canaveral. Along the way he will be speaking at to school groups, many on reservations throughout the western states.

We're pretty excited about this. We, along with the Chickasaw Nation, Trek Bicycles and GearUp South Dakota (a program to encourage high school students on reservations to go on to college and take science and math courses--so far it has had a 100% success rate in getting the kids to go to college!) are sponsors of the ride. You can get more information about the trip at rocketrek.com. He will be posting daily updates during the ~3 month tour. Also, you can read a summary of the trip plans at city-sentinel.com. Peter, my son, wrote the article for that weekly Oklahoma City paper.