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This blog chronicles our ride across North America. We began on June 14th in Anacortes, Washington, and rode roughly 3400 miles to Portland, Maine, with breaks, over 37 days.


My name is Evan (26) and my father is Dave (60). This was his crazy idea.We have chosen to raise funds for an organization called the FHSSA, which has a new website here.


A donation page has been set up for our trip, on the National Hospice Foundation website

You all have helped us raise $2300 so far, so a big thanks.

If you want to know why we chose this fund, see THIS POST HERE.

If you want to be emailed updates, you can use the "Follow" gadget (on the right, below), as I won't be doing the weekly mass emails that some have come to expect from me. On the flipside, I'll avoid updating you on every cornfield we pass.




Wednesday, May 26, 2010

19 days to go...

Less than 3 weeks to go, and our donation page went live a few days ago.

Donate Here.

A few notes on donations: they are tax deductible, matching is available if your employer has it, and you have the option of donating anonymously. FHSSA will share names with me, but not dollar amounts (so we can thank you personally after the trip. Also, the site is encrypted (you'll notice it is the NHF site embedded within the FHSSA site). Questions?

Game plan for this weekend: Dave will be riding from Spokane to Sandpoint (Idaho) for a night, and return the next day to test out his gear and how much food one can eat over 200 miles in 2 days. My mom, Tammy will be meeting him there.

I will be riding from my Ballard (Seattle) to Anacortes to scope out our official starting point. Although I'm attempting to do the 180 miles "unsupported" over saturday/sunday, my good buddies Mike & Allison will join me with a bike & car, and we are sleeping at an organic farm in the area.

see below for the exciting routes.



Finally, I'm long overdue for some pictures. Here are our trainer setups that we've been using since January. (My dad chooses to just listen to music, I try to study or watch tv, based on my sweatiness). Obviously, I've been watching the Giro recap every night.


And this is the map my dad has been drawing on, day by day to emulate/imagine "the ride". I've lost my training notes from March among my lecture slides, so I can't tell who's further along at this point. I'd imagine Dave.

Saturday, May 8, 2010

More on FHSSA...

My dad had suggested this trip around August, and it seemed as far-fetched as our dream of motorcycling around the Mediterranean.  By October I knew he was serious, as he had purchased guide books and researched how to do a trip of this length, unsupported. Also by October, his father was given 3 months to live, which has made for an emotional year in our family.

Over Christmas, Dave and I began discussing the idea of raising funds for a charity.  Since our family had recently seen the compassionate benefits of palliative care with the loss of Dave's brother, Larry, as well as the newly-opened discussions with his parents about their end of life care, we used this as a springboard.

When we stumbled across the FHSSA online (which began as the Foundation for Hospices in Sub-Saharan Africa), we read through their goals, talked it over briefly, and knew it was something we wanted to support. They strive to form alliances between programs stateside to hospices in Africa that focus on community health services specific to end of life care. The FHSSA Impact Fund was developed by their affiliate, the National Hospice Foundation, to raise funds to support the programs of FHSSA.

Our experiences with hospice programs here in Washington have been excellent, and it's a topic that doesn't receive a lot of discussion day to day (at least among my friends). The severity of need in Sub-Saharan Africa, specific to end of life care, hardly needs mentioning.

We also liked the idea that a portion of the funds go on to pay for bicycles that can become integral in the delivery of palliative care in remote areas. I guess the bicycle part was the deal-breaker, because there's a myriad of funds worth supporting, but this one seemed personal on few levels.

My grandfather, Ev, is currently being assisted daily through an excellent hospice program in Spokane, and his wife of 70 years, Liz, has been using her lifelong career as a nurse to its fullest potential with him.  While he has outlived the initial prognosis of three months, his recent days have not been easy. Ev and Liz served as medical missionaries for the majority of their careers (as a doctor and nurse, respectively) in under-served populations in South America, the Middle East, and Africa. It's hard to summarize their lives, so I will likely introduce them better in another post.

If you you're interested in other funds specific to Africa such as the one we found, take a look at aidforafrica.org, which is collaborative in nature and appears to ensure our money is going into well-organized programs. 

A donation page will be created on the FHSSA website, specific to our trip, and it will allow us to 'track our progress' on donations. Also, it keeps all of the tax-deductible hoopla out of our hands (their tax code is on the site).

Five Weeks to Go.

Dave visited in Seattle two weeks ago, and we were able to finish up our shopping for the trip, minus a few power bars and snacks we'll buy the day before. 

We have been lacking in updates, but now that we're distributing our business cards, it's time.

I'll get some pictures of our trainers, and loaded bikes shortly (when I'm not in NYC). And we have a conference call next week with the the director of FHSSA. Our own donation page on their newly renovated website should happen next week. 

Here's a picture from early March, before a 65 mile trip to get smoothies in Idaho. (Also, that's Thorin, our third Springer Spaniel worthy of a Tolkien name. He was put down a few weeks after this picture. He loved jumping high into the air off of docks and resting his chin on everybody's feet.)