Greaseball Challenge - Greasin’ for Charity!

Another great development in bio-fuels I heard about from Green Options is called “Greaseball Challenge.” It seriously doesn’t get much cooler than this: the Greaseball Challenge is a race from the USA to Costa Rica in vehicles running strictly on renewable fuels. And it’s a charity benefit. Their site describes the challenge:

The Greaseball Challenge is a charity biofuel car rally
from the USA to Central America. Inspired by the tradition
of the classic car race, Greaseball is a cross-continental
adventure promoting sustainability on a shoestring using
renewable fuels.
The inaugural Greaseball Challenge departs on April 1, 2007.
Armed with nothing but a sense of adventure and some
cheesecloth, five teams will drive 4,500 miles on grease power
from the USA to Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua
and Costa Rica.

I am so tempted to sign up for this thing! It’s fun to watch the racers’ progress on the Greaseball Challenge blog and live on the road vicariously. I’ve always wanted to drive down to Peru, I might just have to copy these Greaseballs and follow their route…

 

New Site for GreaseMonkeys

Thanks to Green Options, I found out about a great new site for people running on veggie fuel that need help finding friendly restaurants with grease to spare. It is called 100th Grease Monkey, and the aim of the site is to create a database of restaurants offering grease for fuel to traveling “Grease Monkeys” like us! The database is just getting started, but I’m excited to see this project grow. It certainly would come in handy for a WVO-fueled road trip!

Here’s some info on the idea behind the 100th Grease Monkey site:

The story of the “Hundredth Monkey Effect” originated with Lyall Watson in his 1979 book Lifetide, in which he claimed to describe the observations of scientists studying macaques on the Japanese island of Koshima in 1952. Some of these monkeys learned to wash sweet potatoes, and gradually this new behavior spread through the younger generation of monkeys—in the usual fashion, through observation and repetition. However, according to Watson the researchers noted that once a critical number of monkeys was reached—the so-called hundredth monkey—this previously learned behaviour instantly spread across the water to monkeys on nearby islands.

What does all this have to do with veggie vehicles? Well, the hope of this website is to launch the “Hundredth Monkey Effect” in regards to veggie fuel. If enough people visit this website and enough restaurants choose to be included in our database, we hope to reach a level of awareness that changes society on a fundamental level. All we need is a few more grease monkeys to reach that critical point. So please, spread the word and help us reach that ever so important 100th Grease Monkey!

Go Grease Monkeys, go!

And as for an update on the bus, she’s running, but not too reliably. I drove her around town this weekend and she had trouble starting at first, but after one run she did just fine and started up each time I tried after that. We are planning to put in a new Turbo Diesel engine (or TDI) before we do any major trips. This ol’ engine just isn’t working well and we know we’ll need to upgrade eventually, so we might as well get a reliable engine in her sooner rather than later. It will be nice when we have an engine that is powerful enough for the size of the bus (the 1.6 L diesels just aren’t enough to move a big bus up hills), and we have a friend who will help with the installation, so now we just need to find a new engine that will last us a while. Drop me a line if you know of any good resources for finding newer TDs or TDIs!