Wow, what a day! There’s so much that happened, it’s going to be hard to cover it all.

The day started by finishing up the packing of the minivan, saying goodbye to our pets Truman, Cleo, and Velcro and leaving them in the hands of our housekeeper. We then drove over to the Utah Diabetes Center for the send-off event at 11am today.

And what a send-off event it was! There were balloons, flowers, table arrangements, snack foods (including M&M-like candies done in the Bayer corporate colors), and a light lunch. I’m not used to people giving so much attention to me and I truly didn’t feel worthy of it all.

I think nearly all the people that I had sent an invitation to were there plus a few that stopped by through word-of-mouth.

I did a couple interviews for local TV stations, talked with people, and posed for a lot of photos. I was enjoying talking with people so much that I missed the light lunch entirely. Probably not such a good idea with a 60 mile ride coming up. By the time I got indoors, Steve McBride, the local Bayer sales rep., was making an introduction. After he spoke, Damon Blaco, Assistant Marketing Manager for Bayer HealthCare’s Diabetes Care Division said a few words about the Ascensia Dream Fund and introduced me.

After I spoke, it was time to ride. I said a bunch of goodbyes and gathered outside with about a dozen friends who were going to ride with me. I did a ribbon-cutting as an official start to The Dream Tour and then we were on our way. As we rode south through Salt Lake County, riders would peel off as they got to the point where they felt they needed to turn around. So, there was a lot of stopping to say goodbye to people. I’m thrilled to have The Dream Tour underway, but it was a little sad to be saying goodbye to friends for the next seven months.

By the time we reached Provo, Utah, there were still four of us still riding. There were more goodbyes when we reached our destination in Provo because Paul and Mike (in yellow in the picture) were getting a ride back to Salt Lake City.

We really lucked out on weather today. The National Weather Service was predicting a mix of rain and snow for the Salt Lake City area and we had just a few drops of rain as we rode through the Lehi area. Tomorrow though is another day. The weather tomorrow is supposed to be a high of 44 degrees, south light winds, and up to 3 inches of snow. It probably won’t accumulate on the road, but it will make for challenging riding conditions.

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 18th, 2006 at 9:23 pm and is filed under The Dream Tour. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.