Grand Island, NE (Day Off)

We woke up relatively early today, at around 7:30. Even for my standards, it was pretty early for a day off. We headed down in our “Push Tuxedos” (our team t-shirt and khaki shorts and sandals) and headed to breakfast. One of the sponsor’s husbands owns a Arby’s and we went there for breakfast. I didn’t even know Arby’s sold breakfast…now I know.
It was delicious, we were served breakfast burritos, French toast sticks, cinnamons, and chocolate milk. It got me thinking, this is a lot of unhealthy food, but hey, it’s my day off. After Arby’s we headed to an elementary school for a friendship visit. Since it was a weekday, they had a summer classes going on, so we hopped into the classes that served the disabled. We interacted with the students for a while, where we painted a lobster. Afterwards, we went to the gym and played ball a little bit. I basically spent most of the time with a kid name Carlos who refused to talk to me. Once we got to the gym, however, he still wasn’t talking to me but at least he was playing basketball with me, and I got a couple of laughs out of him.
After that friendship visit, we headed to a park for another friendship visit, with high school and middle school kids with disabilities. It was a lot of fun, and was pretty neat to see, as this park was built by Push America in the early 90’s.
We finally came back to lodging where we were treated to lunch. For lunch, we had the Runza burger from the chain restaurant, Runza. It was a German styled food, basically a roll injected with cabbage and ground beef. It was a little plain but it was pretty interesting. I wouldn’t call it a burger, but it was, well, interesting. It’s basically a Nebraska and Iowa chain, so if there was one word to describe it, I would call it, you know, interesting.
After lunch, I pretty much went back to the room and took the longest nap. I woke up and decided to do something productive before our evening festivities. I went to the gym for a while and ran a little bit. It was nice doing some cardio that didn’t involve a bike.
We got ready for dinner and headed off the Ashley park, where we were there not too long ago. There was a lot of people there, at least 400, mostly from the community. They served us pizza and chips and had a snow cone machines. I was still stuffed from lunch so I didn’t have much. After meeting and interacting with a bunch of the community, there was a few speeches that went around, especially since this was the last year the three main sponsors were sponsoring Journey of Hope. Before we knew it, it was already 9 and we headed back to a school across the street from the hotel where the three sponsors treated us to a slideshow. The first half of the slideshow were just a few pictures from the previous day, over the second half were pictures from the previous Journey of Hope teams. It was neat to see how the teams have grown over time to what it is now. Following an emotional goodbye (or rather see you later), we headed back to hotel with some food for thought. It was a long and tasking day, and it was nice to unwind with some Tour de France footage. It’s amazing how addicting this sport is.