Pink Heals my hometown

Before I start on today, I forgot to add this picture from yesterday.  As we were up at Advocate Good Shepherd in Barrington yesterday, we met a Mom and her daughter, Haley.  Haley, as you can see from the photo below, was just diagnosed with brain cancer.  A very rare form of brain cancer.  The Mom told us less than 4% of all brain tumors are of this type.

"No one fights alone"

It's a great sentiment.  I don't know if it's "owned" by anyone, but it really addresses something we do, whether intentional or not. 

We support.

We love.

We care.

Go team Haley, indeed.  It's a team we should all join.

On to today.  

As I tried to fill in some of the open dates in the Illinois portion of this year's tour, I thought about this area right away.  And my first thoughts, truth be told, were that the towns were too small to support an effort like this.  But then, I thought of last year and how great our days in Baltic and McLaughlin SD were and I thought, why not?  

And then, I thought of my nephew, Kevin and his wife, Cori.  Cori lost her Mom to cancer a couple years ago.  And, I thought Cori might feel pretty passionate about something like a Tour stop.

So I made a phone call.  And I gave them a brief (vocabulary alert!) synopsis of what we do.  And I gave them the website.  And I told them to search YouTube.  

And they were all in.

Now, mind you, this all happened in the space of about three weeks.  In between their jobs and a family vacation (maybe two) they put together a great day.  Between the towns of Genoa and Burlington we did two static displays and four home visits.  The folks from the Genoa-Kingston Fire Rescue District escorted us into, throughout and out of town and to all four home visits which included

Grandma Tessie, shown here telling my guy Chuck how she used to live in Winston-Salem, NC in his still district (Fire Dept. term)

And Carol, shown here between her daughter and hubby.  The really cool thing about Carol's visit was...

The Genoa-Kingston High School marching band taking part in the visit.  It was great!  Except for afterwards when some crabby, old man yelled at them because they weren't "making music"

I couldn't help myself. 

As we left Genoa, we got picked up by Burlington Fire and they led us into town and briefly around town ending up at The Oasis gas station.

I think the best part of the day, for me personally, was when we set up in Burlington (town motto "We're so small, we don't even have a Wikipedia page").  It kind of gave me a "local boy makes good" feel and it was really nice.  

Saw some people I haven't seen in a long time, met some new people had some killer pizza (I'm afraid I'm going to ruin Vickkkki, Chuck and Eddie.  After the pizza they've eaten up here, they'll throw that crap they call pizza back home in to street), some really great, home-made pulled pork (that's health food, right?) and a really spectacular (an under-used word imho) Fat Elvis ice cream.  That's right, you heard me, Fat Elvis.  Banana ice cream, peanut butter swirls and chocolate chunks.  

Two scoops baby.

Pink Heals!

Peace