Saturday June 28th

The bat phone rang at 4:45am Saturday morning, less then 4 hours after I went to bed. It was a cyclist calling with travel changes. I am not going to lie, I let it go to voice mail, but did check it before rolling over to go back to sleep for another hour. Phone calls at all hours of the day and night have not stopped and when they are from a cyclist or a cyclists family I do not care, when they are the wrong number in the middle of the night, I get a little upset.

The team breakfast was at 7:00 am on Saturday, and our group was considerably larger, and so were our tasks for the day. The first order of business was setting the airport shuttle schedule. I also had to change the name on the reservation for the mini van we were renting for the day, which turned out to be the biggest pain!! Another black mark against Thrifty rental car.

Another task for the morning was purchasing a printer cable. Evidently when you purchase a new printer it does not come with a cable.

A few hours of my morning was putting together 12 groups of cyclists for the bike safety course. Now this was not quite as easy as just throwing together groups. The bike safety practical training was taking place in two sessions on Sunday, the 1st from 1:00 pm – 2:30 and the 2nd from 3:00 pm – 4:30pm. At 1:00 pm 30 or so cyclists needed to be at one type of leadership meeting and at 3:00 pm 10 different cyclists needed to be at another meeting. So I had to make sure these cyclists were in the groups that met at the opposite times as well as make sure that family members were in the same groups. After working on this and getting the printer up and running I had everything I needed for registration.

Registration was from 2pm – 5pm and I was so excited to finally meet many of the cyclists in person. During registration one of the funniest moments of the entire trip happened – see the next entry for that story.

Here are some picture I found on other blogs of registration.

Look me on the phone - big surprise!

We actually extended registration until 5:30 since we had a steady stream of people coming in. I knew I was going to have to hold late registrations, so I was okay with staying later if it meant less people to track down.

With the longer time, it meant I had to go right from registration to catering to pick up the cakes for the Meet and Greet starting at 7:00 pm and needed to set up the patio. We got that all set up and soon the patio was filled with cyclists.

Here are a couple pictures I found.

The sea of yellow was a common sight
There was program on the patio, but I missed it, I was on the phone with cyclists who were at the airport. Big surprise.

After the meet and greet I held another registration for the late arriving cyclists, then cleaned up both the patio and the registration room. Lisa Brouwer, one of the cyclists was a great help to me that night. She jumped right in and help out. She is great about doing that. I miss Lisa. After another long day I finally fell into bed around 1 or so.