Day 54: That's a Lot of Cheddar

Course: Day off!

We woke up and headed out to the Cleveland Children's Hospital for breakfast and a friendship visit. We split up into small groups and then were given a tour of the facility. They showed us their pool, gym, therapy rooms, and dialysis rooms. We didn't get to interact much with the kids, but I did get to talk to José when we went to dialysis. He's a 15-year-old whose kidneys don't work. He has to go to dialysis so that the machines can do the work of his kidneys for 3 hours, 5 days per week. I struck up a conversation with him and was able to find out a lot about him in just that 10 minutes that we were together. He loves English class and loves writing. He's not much of a video game kid; I thought that was impressive. José keeps a journal every day and wants to write a book one day about his battle with cancer. He already has a title for the book picked out and everything. The guy was really an inspiration.

After the tour we were asked to give an encore Kids on the Block performance. We had thought that the show was done for the rest of JOH, so we were pumped to be able to give one more. Again, we went all out with it and made the audience laugh a lot. Unfortunately, that performance was truly our last one. I had a blast doing the puppet shows, and as I said before, it will be one of my fondest memories of the trip.

For dinner we went to a place called The Melt. They specialize in grilled cheese sandwiches of all sorts. I got a deep fried grilled cheese with shrimp and aioli. It. Was. Amazing. I enjoyed my meal, but a couple of the crew guys (Jesus and Josh) decided to make their nights miserable by taking on the Melt Challenge. They're our biggest guys, but our server said he's seen 80+ people attempt it and 3 people finish it. It involves eating 3 1/2 pounds of every cheese that the place has, and then eating a combined 1.5 pounds of fries and coleslaw. Seriously, guys? They plan on doing a ride along tomorrow too...yikes.

Josh quit about halfway through. Jesus, the underdog in the competition, made it til there was about half of the pile of coleslaw and not too many fries left. He then proceeded to get up (forfeiting the challenge by doing so) and go hurl in the bathroom.

My chapter brother that loaned my brother and I the same bike to ride for the trip, Rudy Granaghan, was one of the sponsors for the meal. It was great to see him and catch up.