Relay was great, but glad it's over!

American Cancer Society's theme this year: Celebrate. Remember. Fight Back.

Me and Melissa L. at opening ceremonies. My hair looked crappy because of the humidity...dang it!!!

Opening lap is all Survivors.

Me presenting Melissa B. a photo of her husband who formed a team over in Iraq and they raised over $200!! He's been there since January.

My teams campsite at night. I made those big cancer ribbons wrapped in checkers and lights!


From the beginning: On Friday morning my Co-Chair and I went and picked up the 2 rental vans Enterprise donated to us to use as Shuttle vans, since the parking lot at the school is about 1/4 mile to the track. Most of the elderly can not walk that so it's nice to have 2 vans shuttling them back and forth. Then we met up with our committee at Chili's at 11:30 for a last minute meeting and lunch. After lunch and before 3:00 which is when we were able to get on site to start set up, we went and picked up 40 cases of water from Walmart, picked up the remainder of event T-shirts and went and bought stakes, rope and handicapped parking signs from Home Depot.

At 3:00 we got on site and participants were already showing up with their RV's and camping equipment. It never crossed my mind to tell them all to show up at 5:00 to give us time to set up and to be able to post campsites around the track. But it worked out. I was glad to see the excitement in them. Right away our tents showed up. We had 1-20'x30' w/3 sides for the Survivor tent, 3-10'x20' for our Registration, Fightback/luminaria and Kids Camp. And we had 3-10'x10' for our Radio MC, BBQ vendor and our Volunteer Police. Then our stage showed up and that was set up quickly. Before we knew it, all of our equipment was there and the field was taking shape. We went out and hung all the signs outside by the streets and placed signs directing traffic. We moved out 30 tables for the various tents and 100 chairs for in front of the stage and a few for Kids Camp. Then we had to run back out to Walmart and the Grocery store to get a few more things.

Cheryl and Cathi both had trailers out there so we stayed Friday night at the track. I got into bed at about 2 am Saturday morning...Cheryl never went to sleep. And poor Cathi was in bed a lot because she had been battling an illness all week and it went into the weekend. We got up at 5:00 am to get out and hang some more banners that were made of paper and since the humidity is so bad because of Diamond Valley Lake that's right there we couldn't hang them the night before. We finally got back around 6:15 and started getting dressed. I got out of the trailer about 7 am and I never stopped until 3:30 am Sunday morning when I just couldn't go anymore. Good ole Cheryl let me sleep for a couple of hours...once again...she didn't sleep at all. She was up for way over 48 hours and she was still going strong.

The event went really well. We had a few glitches with sound from the stage. Not everyone could hear. And we had a few issues with the games. But all in all the event went perfectly and we raised over $21,000 in the 24 hour period. We reached and surpassed our goal of $51,000. We had over 150 Survivors and 46 teams and well over 600 participants. Since Cathi was so ill all weekend, I didn't have a chance to participate with my team at all. In fact, I sat with them all of maybe 5 minutes. But it was worth it. I had a lot of people come up and say how nice it was and how they look forward to it again next year. A lot of new people who didn't know what Relay was wants to be a part of the planning committee next year. That's all good news. The new event chair is so gung ho that she has already secured the date and the school for next year and getting the contracts signed so they can get started. That's exciting.

I have a few pictures that I got from a friend, but we had a professional photographer come out and as soon as I get those, I'll put a slide show on here for you. Her dad took his plane up during the day and got an Aeriel shot, so that will be cool. He wanted to do it again at night when we lit the luminaria bags and spelled our HOPE in the middle of the field, but the winds had kicked up and fog rolled in a bit so he couldn't.