Who: Cliff Ricketts, Middle Tennessee State University professor and alternative fuels researcher
What: Resumption of Ricketts' "Southern Fried Fuel" quest: Driving from Key West, Florida, to Seattle, Washington, using biodiesel from waste animal (chicken) fat and MTSU-produced cooking oil utilized to help run equipment at the MTSU farm/Experiential Learning and Research Center in Lascassas, Tennessee.
When: Sunday through Tuesday, March 8-10
Where: Trip resumes 20 miles east of Kansas City, Missouri, en route to Seattle (nearly 1,850 miles total).
The route: Interstate 70 west in Missouri; I-29 north in Missouri, Iowa and South Dakota; I-90 west in South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho and Washington; I-5 in Washington.
Major cities and towns along the way: Kansas City and St. Joseph, Missouri; Council Bluffs (Omaha, Nebraska) and Sioux City, Iowa; Sioux Falls and Rapid City, South Dakota; Billings, Butte and Missoula, Montana; Coeur d' Alene, Idaho; and Spokane and Seattle. (Ricketts and his team, which includes MTSU students, will leave Murfreesboro by 9 a.m. Saturday, March 7, driving through Nashville and Clarksville in Tennessee; Paducah, Kentucky; southern Illinois; and St. Louis and Columbia, Missouri, before reaching the Kansas City area.
The backstory: In a 1981 Volkswagen Rabbit diesel pickup truck using waste animal fat, Ricketts drove more than 1,600 miles from Key West to near Independence, Missouri, Nov. 8-11, 2014. In Grain Valley, Missouri, about five miles from Independence, the truck developed a transmission problem. It forced the postponement of the trip until now. ... Ricketts, 66, a Wilson County, Tennessee, native who earned his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville and doctorate from Ohio State University, has spent 38 years at MTSU researching alternative fuels. His career achievements include twice driving more than 2,600 miles from the Georgia coast near Savannah to the coast at Long Beach, California, using zero petroleum in 2013 and 2.15 gallons of gas in 2012.
