Conditions: Long walks
We woke up this morning and immediately headed out to a friendship visit at Envision. Their mission is: "to provide services that promote choice, independence and community integration to people with developmental disabilities and other special needs." Envision had just picked up a new bike for their clients. They gave us a bunch of sidewalk chalk and cones so we set up an obstacle course for the clients to ride through. They would come up one by one, and since none of them knew how to ride a bike we would walk them through it while holding on their bike. We had drawn things out on the ground like Denver, Iowa, Cleveland, and finally D.C. That way, they could make their own Journey of Hope. A lot of them really liked that thought. At the end of the ride, when clients hit D.C., we would take a picture with them holding the bike above their heads. There were so many clients that some people helped with the bike ride while others were able to play ball games or just talk with someone. I talked for a while with Christine. She told me a lot of stories about her pet bunny, Brownie. One of the highlighter stories was when Christine told me that she tried to give Brownie a bath, but when she was done had to call the ambulance to do CPR on him. I made her promise not to give Brownie any more baths.
Some of the people that we took on the bike ride were nothing short of overjoyed to be doing it. Watching them be terrified on the bike but then elated at the finish was extremely fulfilling.
The friendship visits are always amazing, but sometimes the time off is much needed. We headed into the city and went to a place called UB Dogs for lunch. It's apparently the best dog place in all of Chicago. I'm going to back up that statement too - it was amazing. If you're in the area and need a place to go I recommend it. After the greatest hot dogs I've ever had, a bunch of us went to the Chicago Aquarium. It was about a 2 mile walk, and it was hot out, so it wasn't very fun to get there. However, the aquarium itself was awesome. Derek schmoozed the employees into giving us a discount too. We got to see Beluga whales, a dolphin show, jellyfish, and much much more. David went with us, and he's terrified of fish. We went to an exhibit where you could pet starfish, and we kept poking him in the side to scare the crap out of him. It took about 30 seconds for him to get his hand submerged in the water...before he touched the starfish.
We had to make good timing to get back to dinner on time. We trekked across the city to make it to the parking lot just in time. As a team, we rolled over to Gino's East Pizzeria. They have famous deep dish pizza and it was even better than the hot dogs from lunch. After a long and hot day we headed back to the resort to crash for the night.
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