Pedal Trans-America 2008: Battlefields

A message from the Connecticut Burns Care Foundation

Ryan and Dwight hope to raise $10,000 to support the burn camp, which will host 70 children between the ages of 8 and 18. They are determined to reach the West Coast as a personal challenge as well as helping young burn survivors.

Started in 1991, the Arthur C. Luf Children's Burn Camp is located in northern Connecticut on 176 acres. Every summer, burn survivors come to the burn camp, which is a safe and fun environment that helps kids heal emotionally and physically. The Burn Camp is free to the children, who come primarily from the Northeast and some foreign counteries, but any burn survivor child anywhere is welcome. More than 70 adult counselors, primarily active and retired firefighters and burn unit nurses, occupational and physical therapists, child psychologists and even a doctor will serve as mentors for the week.

It's also our goal to promote burn awareness and fire prevention and education, which we do year around. We sponsor a burn survivor, burned in a car accident that involved speeding and drinking alcohol, who speaks to high school students throughout Connecticut. We also support the burn unit at Bridgeport Hospital, helping to purchase equipment.

Monday, June 16, 2008

Battlefields

The tall grass swayed in the wind while its roots gripped that ground which had been watered by the blood of thousands, and the tears of countless others. This morning we stood by the stone monuments that marked their graves, and spent a solemn moment feeling the weight of all those young lives that were spilled out on those now quiet hills.

West of Gettysburg the hills felt steeper than they looked, probably having a lot to do with the wind coming down off of them, which made it a slow-going start, today. Some sun-showers drizzled benevolently down on us as we struggled up a long, steady climb. We passed what looked like a rain-induced auto-accident, a pick-up had skidded off the road, coming to rest in somebody's fence at the end of a trail of disrupted earth. It looked like someone else's bumper might have been involved, too. A woman was standing at the road side on a cell phone with her hand on her forehead, but she sounded calm. It didn't look like anybody was hurt, thankfully, but as we rode on all kinds of ambulances and firetrucks flew passed us in the direction of the accident.

We're sitting in the Grove Family Library in Fayetteville, on our way up Route 30 to Pittsburgh. About 160 miles and The Appalachians remain between us and Steel Town.