Day Off-Indianapolis

Today was one of our few remaining days off and an really awesome day because of a great friendship visit at Noble. I woke up early an headed down the street to the campus bookstore that’s associated with Barne’s and Noble and has a Starbucks in it to get my morning fix and attempt to post a few backed blogs. It took me nearly 24 hours to learn that IUPUI is not Purdue and is in fact a joint program between Purdue and IU.

At 10:30 we rolled out for a friendship visit at Noble. One thing that is really interested when heading into a friendship visit is that you have no idea what to expect sometimes, it could be one of your best friendship visits ever or you may not really connect with the clients; our visit at Noble was great because of how organized the event was. Noble is a resource center for people with disabilities and had our entire afternoon planned out. The visit began with a sponsored lunch and then a short presentation about what we would be doing for the next few hours. Noble has dedicated rooms for various activities including an awesome art studio, a music room, and a gym.

I was assigned to music room where everyone was excited to sing karaoke and dance; all of the client were really interactive and really impressive with the instruments. I had the opportunity after a little while to see some of the other rooms and activities including art Olympics in the studio. Art Olympics combines a rotational art project with bowling, football, and other coordination activities. At the first station every one received a blank piece of cardboard and had the chance to draw whatever they wanted, then you would have to throw three balls into three different baskets before advancing to the collage station. The last station was the coolest in my opinion because we took our artwork and put in a bucket with paint and marbles and shook the bucket around so the painted marbles rolled over the artwork; they all came out really neat!

Music room

The gym with Wii fit and some hoops!

Art Studio



Mike chatting it up!

Bingo and Bags room

After our awesome friendship visit we made a much needed trip to the bike shop where they warrantied my rear wheel failure and gave me a free $65 tire! I also bought a second tire so that I wont have to rack again if I ruin another one on the road.

We had a sponsored dinner at the Kelley household, David a Trans America Pi Alpha (someone who's ridden the trip before) kindly invited us into their home for a delicious tacos dinner. I ate entirely too much and gorged myself on dessert which was a warm brownie sundae.

Dean our cycling coach from Seattle lives in Indianapolis and coaches at a small private school Marion University. He invited us to meet him downtown and a bunch of us went out and told him all about our trip and our amazing (and not so amazing) rides and how great the trip had been so far.

Tomorrow we ride to Oxford, Ohio another state off the list and one closer to home which is bittersweet. We'll be joined by a three day Pi Alpha Tom Sawyer (yes that's really his name).