Blacksburg Service Project

I know you've probably moved on with your lives, but I wanted to selfishly take a week from the trip before writing my wrap-up posts. I just wanted some time to reflect and miss my friends and still savor the emotions of such a neat journey.  I can't even imagine how the other riders feel now having been riding for 2 weeks. We're all friends on Facebook now, so I get to follow pictures and fun posts. I'm still signed up for the Twitter messages, as well, so I know they're near Lexington, KY... or at least they were last night,  so add 60 more miles!

Last Saturday, we all met up for breakfast in Blacksburg at a well known vegetarian restaurant called Gillie's.  The food was A-MAZ-ING. Bret had kindly driven back down to pick me up in Blacksburg, but it was also a fun chance for him to revisit his old stomping grounds and see Don and other Bike the US for MS alumni. I rarely visited Virginia Tech when I was in school at JMU, so it was fun to get to know the area a bit better. It's a lot smaller than I remember. For the service project, we broke into two groups. One group helped wash windows and set up for a yard sale and the group I was in helped with massive gardening chores. The husband had gathered lots of gardening tools and all of the supplies, so all we had to do was roll up our sleeves and get to it. We raked out a trench and lined it with tree branches to make a walkway through the yard. We raked leaves all over the yard and planted flowers and ferns. The biggest part of the project was building a planter and planting an herb garden that was nearly as long as the front of the house, which is something his wife, who has MS, has always wanted. They provided a delicious homemade lunch for us that was probably the best meal we had all week! He also is a photographer and let us all take some of the nice photo greeting cards he had made. They were very grateful for the yard work and we were happy to be able to help out for a few hours. 

The group spent the rest of their afternoon doing laundry and grocery shopping before heading south and west on Sunday, only a few days before they hit a new state - Kentucky! 

In the evening, Don and Cassie hosted an awesome bbq at their house.  We got to meet Don's parents, which was great. He started Bike the US for MS since his mother has MS, so it was really nice to meet his inspiration. I can also tell where he gets his laid back attitude and sense of humor from. One of the route leaders, Claire, had put together a first week video (which I posted in my previous blog), so it was fun to relive everything together as a group. It was the last time we would truly all be together before the segment riders left and the others carried on. I made a super awkward speech in between mouthfuls of s'more bites. I think the group understood how much it meant to me to share this experience with such a great group of people and we all had a better understanding of what we were riding for.