Destination Unknown: Pedaling for JDRF

If you would like to donate, to help find a cure 

for type-1 diabetes,

 go to this link.

Emily and the twins.

Well, I have a plan. I’m going to start off from Acadia National Park, on or about May 1, 2024. I’m going to pedal up to the top of Cadillac Mountain, and snap a few photos. I’m going to be sure to suck my gut in, because I need to shed 25 pounds. Then I’m going to coast down again and head west.

 

No telling how far I may get. I’ll just start pedaling. That’s the plan. I’m 75; I could end up going “over the rainbow” on the first steep climb. (I don’t think there’s a map I can use to find the route from Acadia to heaven.) But I’m stubborn; and I was in the Marines. I know how to handle a physical challenge.

 

So I hope to cover a few miles. 

Me: December 1968.

Meanwhile, I will be raising money for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, which works to find a cure for type-1 diabetes. My daughter Emily has been type-1 since she was 14, nineteen years, now.

 

Emily is tougher than me – and it’s not even close. She’s a dedicated research nurse, a mother of twin boys, Prosper and Story, age 3, and good with her partner’s kids, Zea and Cooper, too. 

 

I’m proud to be her dad.

Story, left, Prosper, waving the hat.

If you know any type-1 diabetics, they NEVER get to coast downhill. You can’t cure type-1. So you have to deal with the challenge every day. It’s like pedaling against a stiff wind – day after day – year after year. Yet they do it, and JDRF funding has helped fund research for a cure, and to advance care. 

I will be trying to raise money as I go. 

Cadillac Mountain - start of a ride across the USA in 2011.

Sidney, in pink, has type-1 diabetes, with brother Sam.
I rode for her and others in 2011.

Lunch break in Grand Teton National Park - 2011.

I pedaled up Tioga Pass, into Yosemite National Park.
(White dot on the road, above handle bars, is a big mobile camping home.

A scene from Wyoming, during my first ride across the USA.
The state has six people per square mile - 2007.

Maybe I'll get far enough this time to see buffalo again?

Or mountain goats in Glacier National Park.

Or even ride the Going-to-the-Sun highway in Glacier.
That would be cool.

 

What would really be cool, though, would be finding a cure for type-1 diabetes. So, I guess I’ll have to pedal a few miles.

 

 

I am hoping people will donate $7.50 for the cause.

(Get it, I'm 75.)