We started this morning at the Dr. Walter Cunningham School for Excellence where we had a chance to meet with sixty 4th graders. I wanted to hear their opinion of how a new ballpark that Build Our Ballpark had built next to their school had affected their community.
The kids were great. They were talkative and spoke their opinion. They really enjoyed talking about the ballpark since it has impacted their lives greatly. A lot of them also love to bike so they really liked hearing about our trip across Iowa to raise money, as well as all of the equipment we wear for long rides. They wanted to know if we could sleep on the long rides, why we wore padding under our shorts, and how our bike shoes worked as well. By the way, they also got a kick out of Michael’s unique haircut and Richard’s short shorts which really lightened up the conversation.
Our conversation was part of program they are doing in their classroom on community service and their teachers really appreciated that we could come and talk to them about what we were doing. Michael and Richard also both related how they had done a lot of community service work when they were in high school so the kids got a lot of examples of people helping others in their community.
After the talk we walked outside to pouring rain which dimmed our enthusiasm for today’s ride. We made the decision to wait an hour to see if the weather would improve, and thankfully we did – we got to get in an hour nap and then left at 11:30 a.m. with the rain almost finished. We wore trash bags to protect us initially, which helped a lot, but at least we were able to keep up our promises to our donors.
In addition to the rain we had strong wind blowing directly at us which made the ride REALLY difficult. We finally made it into Manchester to the comfort of our RV and a great pizza and fried chicken dinner. But we are all really wiped out.
