Sarah Palin and the Amazing Mrs. Pritchard.

Yep, I finished my portion of the tour and had my last official ride into Calvin just a few weeks ago....

I thought the remainder of the week was more challenging than I had anticipated...
Riding from Chesterton to South Haven on Thursday of week 7 was difficult and I had a "bad" day...the wind was in our faces ... it was 80 miles and my left knee was giving me lots of pain.
A fellow rider (Lois Craven) had gotten side-swiped earlier that day and I felt pretty bad about that b/c I had been riding with her just before it happened and Dirk and I had left her at a rest stop b/c we were meeting friends for lunch. Needless to say, it was more of a challenging day than I had anticipated.

I recovered and pulled it into South Haven, but was also glad to have a short day on Fri & Saturday, as my knee was definitely rebelling from the last 850 miles.

The ride into G.R. was good and we had a bright and somewhat cool day. It was perfect riding conditions....
I miss my faithful riding partners already...Leanne Geisterfer, Nancy Niewenhuis, wow, those girls have it going on. I am so proud to know them.

The days are getting cooler and the nights are getting longer. I miss getting out of bed in the morning and getting on the bike and riding for more than an hour. It's been a good summer. I grieve the loss of being out on my bike.

I took the kids to chicago on Monday -- we took Metra into the city to the planetarium. Our membership there ends at the end of the year and we will probalby pick up a new membership somewhere else as that has been a highly successful venture for us this year. We've used our membership for at least 3 family outings and Andrew's b-day party. I love the experience of taking them into the city. It is like a mini adventure every time. I am so proud of my kids and how they've grown intellectually and with judgement and character. God has made them quite beautiful.

Emily and Andrew started school on Wednesday and it was a bit of a traumatic week getting Emily together...but we finally made it happen and got her connected at Lansing Christian and Andrew at Highland Christian...two elementary schools in two states... and two buses coming at widely different times. Our life is getting complicated and we only have 2 kids.

Today was huge for me...I reupped my membership at Fitness Pointe and went to my spin class for the first time in 2 mos. I had let my membership go into "vacation mode" b/c I was gone for the month of August..and was now back for the first tiime. I found the spin class to be equally as challenging as before.
I had a short warmup session on the rowing machine prior and thye made the announcement that John McCain would choose Sarah Palin as his running mate...WOW! there's the wild card they needed to deal to get people back to the party.

For those you haven't seen it, the similiarity between her background and the BBC's production of "The Amazing Mrs. Pritchard" is striking. It is the fictional story of a fantasticly energetic and petite woman who runs a grocery store in the UK...she takes on "the establishment" and manages to turn the electoral process in Britian on its head whehn she breaks up a fight between two candidates for parliament who throw punches in front of her store and then declears that she could do better than those two.

While it has glimpses of social commentary, this story gives every 40 something woman such as myself hope that we are not just doomed to picking up after our kids and doing laundry until we rot. Sarah Palin may be every 40 something mom's american version of hope for us women stuck in the doldrums of life.

Let's go do something beautiful... I'm getting back on the saddle...and I'm going to take the msg of sea to sea to my streets.... we don't need to have poor amongst us...they may be our neigbhros and we dont know it. Let's be the image of Christ to those who may need that extra helping hand today.