A Note from Fatty: You might have first gotten to know Janeen “Noodle” McCrae on this blog when I featured her 100 Miles of Nowhere video last year. Well, this year, she rode across the United States — helping Team Fatty raise thousands of dollars for LiveStrong along the way.
Noodle is, in short, an inspiration.
So when Noodle sent me a brief ride report along with photographs, I definitely wanted to pass them along. Enjoy!
Just a quick note to let you know that I finished my ride across these great United States on Wednesday (Oct. 13) at around 4.30pm. Hoping you can let peeps know of this news so that I may thank them for their support, followings, and random-showing-up-and-the-side-of-the-road antics. I actually have a lot to say about this trip, but I am currently struggling to pull my thoughts together into any kind of sensical ramble. It will come, just not today.
Here are 3 spur-of-the-head thoughts:
1. America is big. A lot of it is empty. I would like to thank all the stupid song writers in the world (mostly from the 80s) who buried their dumb lyrics deep in my head so that these songs would appear randomly in the silence and torture me for HOURS in these locations. Thanks in particular to Billy “You’ve got a nice white dress and a party on your confirmation” Joel, and Randy Newman for the Three Amigos theme (which I actually didn’t mind too much. I can really hold that note for a long time.)
2. America is beautiful. Even those empty parts. I would like to thank Mother Earth for shifting plates in her china cabinet to push mountains up in frighteningly wonderful messes, and flatten out the land in other parts like linen cloth on a table. There were days when landscape changed dramatically several times. Wow is a word that actually doesn’t sound corny and hollow when you see these things for the first time. People need to get out there and feast their eyes on this stuff, if they haven’t already.
3. America is not full of axe murderers. Go figure?! I experienced moments of great kindness, which has reaffirmed my faith in humanity. For every jerk who yelled “Why don’t you just go kill yerself” out a car window, there were 20 who offered a meal or asked if I needed anything. Cheer up america. You’re not as full of suck as you are lead to believe. I’d like to thank everyone who wasn’t a jerk.
And if you would indulge me this one personal note. I would like to thank you. I could have jumped on my bike and ridden across the USA and that would’ve been that and life would have gone on and whatever whatever so long and goodnight. But Team Fatty and raising money for LIVESTRONG became a key component of this trip for me. To the point where I sucked in some friends at Breakfast NY who made Precious (my bike) a brain and donated that brain and a website to help me raise money - refusing my lame attempts to pay for any of that stuff every time I half-heartedly offered.
Although my fundraising goal wasn’t huge, we reached the initial goal and so I upped the ante. Sure, I will fall short of that ambitious $21,310 goal, but I feel that the awareness my lovely tweeting bike raised for LIVESTRONG has served its own function.
For every email or tweet that I’ve gotten about how I’ve inspired some person to get on their bike or donate to the fight, I think about how it’s really just a knock-on effect from you. Your story was the initial hot coal under my seat to get off my arse and do something.
From you, to me, to … the next in line. I wonder who will inspire us next in this fight?
Ride on, Team Fatty!
Janeen “Noodle” McCrae
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