Bruises for Charity

My knees are bruised but my heart is happy. Steve and I woke up early this morning and drove out to a warehouse north of Grand Rapids to volunteer with the Elves and More organization. For the second year in a row (or maybe more??), this group has purchased hundreds of bicycles to give to needy kids at Christmas. They choose one local neighborhood a year to focus on and keep it a secret so it's a huge happy surprise when they show up at Christmas with a semi truck full of bikes. This morning we, along with about 75 other people, built one thousand bikes in a little under four hours. My job was to open the bike boxes and pull all the packaging off the bikes and get them ready to be built. I bet I opened 50+ bike boxes! Once the bikes are built, they are double checked for safety and lined up in the warehouse to be tagged with handmade gift cards. It's pretty cool to see 500 bikes lined up with sparkly hand-drawn Christmas tree and snowman tags that carry happy greetings to the bike's recipient. What's even cooler is that the kids also get helmets and other goodies to go along with their bikes. It was so much fun! We saw so many people that we know from cycling and racing but there were even more people there who just wanted to help - there are truly a lot of good people out there. I can't wait to do it again next year - especially since next year's neighborhood is bigger and there will be 2,000 bikes to build! Here's some photos.....

Unpacking the bikes.....

Craig, doing a double check on a sweet pink cruiser....

The finished product!