Monday, October 16, 2006

3-Day, day one (now with pictures!)

Ok, where was I?

So we get to the hotel in Willow Grove PA and spend a reasonable Thursday night there. It was dark when the four of us woke up; wet, rainy, windy and nasty. And that was just the weather.

A nor'easter had blown in.

The lobby was filled with women dressed up in their Cancer Sucks shirts and buttons and their running shoes and their team flair. The Buddies for Breasts team sported the fashionable boob hats; inevitably, some were a little droopy by day's end.

L had the presence of mind weeks before to order up a cab from the hotel, so instead of paying $14 p/p for a bus ride, it cost us something like $10 for all of us. Not only that, but when the cab got there, we just pushed through the throng and hopped in. No waiting in line for the shuttle. Of course, L would think to do this. She once brought a stapler in her purse for a job interview "just in case the interviewer didn't have one." She's the queen of situation preparedness. If nuclear disaster strikes, I'm headed to her house.

The mall parking lot was busy in the darkness. We checked in, checked our bags into big rigs labeled alphabetically, moved to the coffee tent and waited.

And waited. And waited some more. We couldn't even really tell when daybreak came because the weather was so fucking foul.

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Sorry. I had to say it once.

But the stage was set and we were eventually herded into a corral to await the inspirational stretching exercises. Followed by the inspirational speech by someone from the Komen Foundation, who told inspirational tales followed by exclamations of "Go, Beautiful Woman! Go Beautiful Man!" Which drew pretty rude guffaws and snorts from the crowd, most notably our own little group, which seriously needed a few rounds of espresso to appreciate the significance of the moment. And finally, the really creepy, otherworldly inspirational speech from God (actually a disembodied deep male voice) who admonished us that this was "no walk to the corner to get a newspaper." Like we do that in the suburbs. Stupid God.

And with that, they let us out of the corral, we got our ponchos and schedule of potty locations and lunch and snacks and away we went, in a nor'easter.


We had been led to believe that the walk was basically 20 miles each day. On this particular day, the day of the nor'easter, in which we walked around the hills and valleys west of Philly, many, many hills...it was actually closer to 25.

The route itself was actually pretty nice; we strolled through Chestnut Hill, Manayunk, and some other well-to-do neighborhoods with huge houses. People stood on the streets cheering us on, offering candy and baked goods, free Starbucks coffee and shots of Bailey's.

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We finally finished the route and prepared for camping at Belmont Plateau. It was wet. It was muddy. Oh, yes, that's right. It was a FRIGGING NOR'EASTER and still raining. But there was no camping: they moved more than 2000 people to a high school to camp out in the hallways, shoulder to shoulder with the lights on.

We heard a woman got a cockroach stuck in her hair there.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You're good.
H.

carey said...

Thanks, oh anonymous H. And it's mostly true.