Day Three: Anything But a Down Day

Our house while we were on Edwards Air Force Base. Sweet, huh?

Day three began with breakfast from Burger King—something we all really wanted to avoid. In the house the first night were two girls (Heather Haro, he operations director of the Jeremy Staat Foundation and moi) sharing a bedroom, Jason in one bedroom (single bed), Kevin (bike mechanic) in the master bedroom and Wesley on the hide-a-bed in the living room! When I went to bed I expected to have Jeremy in the master bedroom in the king-sized bed—don’t you agree that a 6’6” man deserves to be in a king-sized bed?—and I sure would have thought Wesley deserved to have a bedroom with an actual bed. But that man simply does not complain and he’s tough as nails. He’s breaking in a pair of new neoprene sleeves for his stumps, and he very matter-of-factly says breaking in new sleeves is tough, and that chafing and blistering is expected.

The first morning I learned Jeremy had slept in the motorhome. That’s where he wanted to be, too.

After inhaling breakfast, we went to the staging area to set up for the day’s festivities which consisted of making Jeremy and Wesley available for passerby. Unlike the day before when the commissary was closed for Presidents’ Day, the parking lot had plenty of activity and visitors to the Jeremy Staat Foundation’s information table, a traveling veterans’ center, and Healing Horses and Armed Forces (Charisse Rudolph and Penny the mini-horse).

There was work to be done though. The van has joined the caravan, and the three Foundation vehicles needed to be outfitted with CB radios. Because we had the luxury of a fully-equipped kitchen, I elected to volunteer to cook dinner and asked Wesley for his meal preference. He said he’d enjoy lasagna or spaghetti, so off I went to the commissary store to buy the ingredients for a green salad, lasagna and to bake a cake.

While I was cooking I took advantage of Edwards Air Force Base’s excellent Internet service. I still had photos to upload and plenty of other things to get done—like check over my media list and try to get information to some television stations, newspapers and radio stations along the way.

What I forgot to share with you all last night is that Dale left the house suddenly last night, saying he needed to check his house because a friend told him it had been broken into. He’d already claimed the sofa for sleeping, so God works in mysterious ways, giving the sofa and hide-a-bed to Wesley as his bedroom. I was not paying attention to what Dale was saying on the phone (he’d made numerous calls) and he suddenly just got up, grabbed his backpack and said “I’ll be back.”

Everyone converged on the house at about 7 p.m. Even Dale had returned. I had overestimated the eating ability of our party which consisted of the three riders, lead vehicle driver Jason, chase truck/bike mechanic Kevin, Dave the RV driver, Heather and myself. But everyone chowed down to their satisfaction and no one went to bed hungry.

Dale grabbed the sofa for sleep. We had a lot of work left to do; there was laundry and we needed to organize our first aid kits for each vehicle. It was a late night, and we finally went off to bed at around 11 p.m. I am pretty sure we are still running on adrenaline.