Atlanta, GA (Day 2)

8.1.2010

Today we had another day off of the bike, but we still had a lot of programming. The day started out with a breakfast at a local Episcopalian church that had a kitchen for the homeless downstairs as part of it’s charity. Many of the people that we met had some form of mental disability and no family to rely on. One of the men I was speaking with told me that the church had helped him a lot, and that he spent a lot of his time at the library reading different religious works. After breakfast all 32 of us headed upstairs to listen to the day’s sermon. The Air Conditioner had broken the night before, which made the sermon seem a lot longer than it actually was. Earlier in the day Tom Schmitt, the team’s expert on air conditioners as a result of his job as an air conditioner salesman, tried to fix it but ended up getting himself electrocuted. Fortunately he wasn’t hurt badly.

We got out around lunch time, so we headed over to Doc Chey's Chinese restaurant for a sponsored lunch, and then back to the hotel for a bit. Brent and I attempted to go get some much needed haircuts at the place down the street, but the wait was too long and we had some more appointments to keep.

Unfortunately this is the only picture I took today...

Later we had dinner with a bowling league called Angels in the Alleys. We went to what was probably the most spectacular bowling alley I’ve ever seen. They had about 40 lanes, and an arcade like a scaled down Dave and Busters. We played for about 2 hours, and I met two guys in wheelchairs named Corey and Tay. Corey was about my age and Tay was four. They were both full of energy and really fun to be around. Despite their wheelchairs, they were able to bowl using specialized ramps that they could roll the ball down. It turns out the cyclists weren’t very good, both Corey and Tay managed to beat most of the Push America guys in our lane. Those guys must have been my good luck charm though, because I bowled the best game I’ve ever had in my life, scoring 171 points. The pizza they got us for dinner added to the good mood. I’m going to be really upset when I get to D.C. and can’t eat like a cyclist who burns 5,000 calories a day anymore.