Day 37: Day off in Calgary

The team woke up so late that breakfast consisted of what was being served for lunch on the soup line. I had actually gotten up earlier since I had gone to bed before the team and had already eaten breakfast, checked e-mail, and checked up on the Tour de France. After doing all this for a couple of hours, I had gone back to bed for a morning nap (very nice) and was asleep for another hour or so before the team got up.

The team wanted to scatter all over the city to take care of things that needed to be done, but there was nothing that I needed to do that was really critical, so instead I stayed in and typed up journals and read. I had a very relaxing day, all to myself and felt very rested.

For dinner, we all went over to the soup line and ate again. Eating with the homeless and talking with the people really opens up all sorts of perspectives. After dinner, we went down to give the van a good cleaning, but it soon turned into a game of basketball. After a good bit of running around I turned back to the van and stuck with it with BJ and Channing until the job was done.

After this, Mercedes came up to me and asked what I thought about staying another day in Calgary instead of moving on. My first mental reaction was ‘no way’ and my gut reaction was ‘no way’. So I asked what was going on.

Turns out that with the team running around so much that they didn’t feel like they really got a day off. And the next few days had no team obligations to be anywhere, so as long as we made up the miles it didn’t matter if we weren’t exactly where we said we were going to be.

I don’t really know why, but I didn’t feel excited to be staying in town another day and so I started thinking of things to do instead. After hearing that the majority (not all) of the team had voted to stay, I decided to go on by myself and have the team catch up to me. I asked Mercedes if this was OK with her and she gave me the thumbs up.

I went to bed after all of the cleaning and planning, ready to see what it would take to get on the road by myself the next day.