We are back in the land of service for good for a while! Prepare for several days worth of adventures coming your way :)
Today’s ride was dedicated to Mary. We met Mary when we were making calls to businesses about donating food to our team and/or asking for a place for our team to shower. When we told her about our mission, she told us that she is a two time breast cancer survivor, and also survived a brain tumor. We ended up doing a Portrait with her and found that she was unbelievably positive about her situation and had an amazing vigor for life. It was an amazing portrait, and everyone was talking about it all day on the ride and even afterward.
The ride was a little bit long for one of our groups today! We had a fairly flat roads with not too many troubles, except there was definitely some debris in the shoulder that got in some of our tires. The first group to roll out in the morning made it to Dubois in time for free ice cream and the local Fourth of July parade. The last group arrived several hours later, but their spirits could not have been higher!
We were so lucky to have a place to watch fireworks tonight on the fourth of July! HUGE thanks to Ian and Cindie for hosting us not only for the local fireworks show, but also for a delicious grilled meal of burgers, hot dogs, salads, fruits, beans, cake, soda, and literally anything and everything we could have asked for. I know that quite a few of us feel homesick at times, especially on days like today that are usually spent with friends and family. We all felt so at home and are so thankful for the wonderful evening.
We were also lucky to be staying at the St. Thomas Episcopal Church who were very accommodating to us! It is becoming more and more common to run into cross country cyclists (I guess there are more crazy [in a good way] people in the world than I thought) so communities are often not shocked when we tell them what we are doing, and have lots of pasta and non perishables ready for us to take along our journey.
Today Viraat gets a huge shout-out. He was a part of the team that kept getting flat tires and had a really long day today. Funnily enough, he was the only one in his group to not get a flat. While that deserves a shout-out on its own, the really awesome thing was that he was smiling and supporting his teammates all day and helped turn what could have been a pretty disheartening situation into a really great day. He and his group were positive and resilient and we are thankful for that!