Wednesday, June 10, 2009

Wheels North


Dear Readers,

A longtime follower and friend of MDOD is involved with a worthy charity called "Wheels North". Click their link in the sidebar or simply read below. Here's a bit by way of explanation...


Dr. M has a young daughter with histiocytosis. He drowns himself in drink, gets 2 DUIs, almost loses his license and ends up divorced. Ultimately he decides to do something positive to help his daughter, and it saves him and hopefully some kids as well. Histiocytosis is an orphan disease, with no research funds, so he decided to organize a fixed gear bike ride across America ("The Big Fix") to raise funds for research. He raised 300k, and now his friends are organizing their own events to continue the effort. M's daughter just beat back another re-occurance of histio needs is still urgent for her and other histio kids. This ride, Wheels North, recreates a historic ride that two broke teenagers took in 1909 from Santa Rosa to Seattle to see the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exhibition (their ride was covered by the Santa Rosa Press Democrat and later in a book titled Wheels North). They wanted to see the event, but couldn't aford a train ticket. Also, Wheels North has a godsend for my son W, who was paralyzed in one leg from cauda equina 18 mos ago. E has been helping him train, and W just did 200 miles today on a tandem with E (-: W will ride one of M's bikes on the ride, and M has been extremely supportive of W also. M himself is sober now, and he just drove for the first time in two years yesterday! He's back together with his wife, and his family is pulling together.
I'll be driving a support truck and organizing all the supplies, so I'm busy too. Feel free to follow our progress on the Wheels North blog (sidebar on
www.wheelsnorth.org).
Thanks so much, and I'll understand if it doesn't work out to post a brief note for Wheels North--but if you can that would be awesome.

Cheers,
L

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