St. Simon’s Island, Georgia
Today, was the first day of my Ride For Haiti, part 2. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the story, the Ride For Haiti was actually supposed to be a three week event from Advent Lutheran Church in Boca Raton, Florida to Lord of Life Lutheran Church in Fairfax, Virginia. That trip was supposed to take place last September. However, due to unforeseeable circumstances we were only able to ride from Boca Raton to Tallahassee Florida in September and we postponed the rest of the trip for May, 2011.
Pastor Andy Hagen of Advent Lutheran Church in Boca Raton and Dr. Chris Ricker of Holy Spirit Lutheran Church and Pastor Frank Wagner of Holy Spirit Lutheran Church, along with Diane Jerauld as our navigator and the driver of our support van all made the trip in September. However, for this part of the journey, Ride For Haiti, part 2 it will only be Pastor Frank Wagner and his wife Martina Wagner as the navigator.
The part one of the Ride For Haiti was 501 miles long. Part 2 will be approximately 1000 miles.
Ride For Haiti part 2 picked up where the part 1 ended. Today, the first day started in south Georgia at St. Simon’s Island. We have never been there before. What a beautiful island of the most spectacular Oak trees. Huge grand trees heavy with what call Spanish Moss. All the homes and stores and golf courses are located under the Oak trees. The wonderful people of Lord of Life Lutheran Church invited Martina and I to speak to their Sunday morning adult ed class as well as some of their older Sunday School youth. We had 42 people present. Lord of Life is a 23 year old congregation. They bought their sanctuary from a Catholic congregation that moved out into new facilities. A beautiful church nestled in the large Oak trees. You will see it in the picture we attached. Martina and I worshiped at their 8 AM service and then we did our presentation from 9:15-10:15. Lord of Life Lutheran has a wonderful pastor, Paul Elbert. He has been there 6 years. Pastor Paul is a second career Pastor, meaning he worked for 25 years in the corporate world before deciding to answer the call to seminary and to being a pastor. He says Lord Of Life will be his first and only church before he retires. Paul and his wife Chris moved to south Georgia from Chicago.
After we presented at Lord of Life then we changed our clothes and planned to start riding towards Savannah. One small problem, our car battery was dead. We had left our refrigerator running off our car battery. Fortunately one of the church members was able to jump us and off we went, leaving around 11 AM. We rode until 4:30 PM and then I needed to load up into the car so that we could be at our next church, Trinity United Methodist in downtown Savannah by 5 PM. So today I rode 51 miles and then I had to call it quits.
Something nice about riding in May instead of September, it’s Spring and the flowers are blooming everywhere and the temperatures are in the 70s and 80s instead of the 90s. Much better for bicycle riding.
I did not know that Trinity United Methodist, where Pastor Enoch Hendry has been pastor for 9 years, is right in the heart of downtown Savannah. They don’t have a parking lot. Our camper this evening is parked in three curbside parking spaces. We have cars and late night diners and bar hoppers and horse drawn carriages walking right by our camper. Amazing! The funny thing was, when we got here three cars had taken the parking spaces that we were supposed to use so Pastor Hendry took street duty and waited for each space to clear and then he would run out and put a garbage can in the space to reserve it. Well, he finally got all three spaces and we could pull in. I’ll bet people have never seen a pop up camper set up in the middle of their down town. My daughter Jessica said we are the first class street people of Savannah. I just wonder how many police officers are going to stop by our camper during the night and wake us up and ask what we are doing here.
The adventures carry on tomorrow morning 7 AM as we pedal on to Rincon, Georgia to Jerusalem Lutheran Church.
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