So many people over the past couple weeks have asked me if I’m riding the length of Africa for a cause, or raising donations, etc. Honestly, it feels disingenuous to say that I’m doing this for charity, because I’m not. It wasn’t something I thought of, I just really wanted to do an adventure like this! But, that said, it’s also a great opportunity to introduce people to a cause that’s close to my heart, and a disease that not many people are even aware exists.
My mom suffers from a rare and relatively untreatable (and uncureable) rheumatological disease called Scleroderma, which wikipedia defines as “a chronic systemic autoimmune disease (primarily of the skin -“derma”) characterized by fibrosis (or hardening -“sclero”), vascular alterations, and autoantibodies”… Basically it’s causing a hardening of tissues in her body (skin is the most obvious, but also heart, lung, intestinal tissues), causing other issues such as Pulmonary Hypertension, and other problems with drug interactions to treat that, etc etc.
Anyway, since people are asking, and this seems like a great medium to get more of a message out there about this disease, please feel free to make a donation to the Scleroderma Society of Canada if you’d like. 🙂
In other news, I’ve been training lots… 2-3 hours a day on the bike watching TV (getting boring though!)… and today I have an interview with CBC about my trip, hopefully to air this weekend. We’ll see! I have no idea what to expect here…
Been tough keeping weight on even with unlimited chips and ice cream and only 3 hours of biking a day… Going to be insane when that’s 5-12 hours and I don’t have ice cream, lol.
Thanks friends, more updates soon!
Kudos to you for such a courageous and exciting adventure. My husband and I got back last summer from two years in Tanzania and visited 4 different game parks while there – Ruaha, Ngorongoro, Lake Manyara and Tarangire. All are very different and you can book a safari truck and guide for $200US a day from almost any hotel in the area. We stayed at the Country Lodge in Karatu and went to Ngorongoro and Lake Manyara from there. At our favourite, Tarangire, we stayed in tented bandas overlooking the park while enjoying great meals in the main lodge and drove our own little Rav4 around the park. You will be there in the rainy season and it can be very muddy at times, but passable. We also visited Hwange Park in Zimbabwe and Chobe Park (our best safari of all) in Botswana. At Chobe we took a road safari and a river safari where you can get very close to the animals and at Hwange Rob did a two-day guarded bike ride through the park. We are not experts at biking through Africa, but are happy to help answer any questions you may have. Jeannie