It was great to welcome Gerald Paterson along as our guest speaker at our dinner meeting.
Gerald had completed his epic trans America cycling journey to raise money for Motor Neurone Disease New Zealand in July and his presentation was about his experiences along the way.
Prior to Gerald’s presentation Membership/Club Services Director Carole Ansley ran a brainstorming session and challenged each table to come up with ideas to generate new members and to provide some names of potentials candidates. As we know membership is one of club’s priorities and the feedback from the session will be collated and fed back to the club at a future meeting. This will no doubt have to happen after BOOKARAMA as Carole is one of the key organizers of this event and it is top of the priority list.
Gerald was ably introduced by Sarah Laing and started his presentation by telling us about the intensive training that he had done to prepare himself for the main event including altitude training as they would be cycling over the Rockies and Appalachian Mountains.
Gerald was one of 3 Kiwis who joined an event called Ride USA organized by ex-British Lion Peter Winterbottom to raise money for Motor Neurone Disease. Amongst the riders was another ex-Lion Mike Teague one other Brit and one American making a total of 8 riders. The 8 riders were in turn supported by 8 support staff including a Physiotherapist, Bike Mechanic and Security Guard. They travelled in mobile homes along with a maintenance vehicle.
The journey started at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco on the 18th May and ended with a ferry across the Hudson River from New Jersey to Manhattan and then a police escort through the streets of New York to Central Park 36 days later.
Gerald shared some of his experiences along the way, climbing 9000ft in one day, having only one day of bad weather, people’s incredible generosity and coping with cycling in 35 degrees with humidity when he had to resort to filling up his sleeves with ice to cool down.
The ride was an epic 5147kms long. They rode up to an altitude of 5450 metres to get over the mountains and importantly for Motor Neurone NZ raised over $52000 for the charity.
Sarah thanked Gerald for his presentation and his self-less commitment and fortitude in completing what was an epic cycling journey.
It was good to have Mike Abercrombie back well enough to steer the meeting through its various stages. The raffle winners were:
Have A Go: 1st Garry Donoghue, 2nd John Savory
New World Vouchers: Alison Kearney x 2 (compensation for the wedding Ali!!)
I will close this President’s message with a special note of sadness for Steve Lines whose brother Andrew has passed away following a fight with cancer. I know all of our thoughts and prayers will be with Steve, Sarah and the extended Lines family.
Rob Mouncey
President
