Rally in Music City, Rally for Chicken, Rally Forever

Staying last night in one of the finest apartments in the Music City, A, C and P were up early this morning, making the final push for the final events of Rally 2008. Vanderbilt Children's Hospital welcomed us and all of our goodie bags at about 9:15am this morning. We went up to the oncology floor and started meeting the kids.
We had a pleasant surprise when several members of the media showed up, including Nashville's local NBC station. NBC decided to extend their stay based on their interest in our story and we had some good coverage in the news tonight on Nashville's local NBC TV station on the 6:00 news. We saw several new faces as well as some familiar ones from years past, and we were once again amazed at the hospital's facilities and operations (some of us vividly remember the big hole in the ground that existed before the hospital was built). A couple of us even got to see Colin, one of our Rally kids for this year, who is still on the heels of his recent stem cell transplant, which has been apparently pretty successful so far. All in all it was a great final hospital visit for RAA 2008.

We left the hospital just in time to get to McDougal's (one of Nashville's finest restaurants to get all things chicken) and to get set up for the guests for our fundraiser there.
Colin's family was there in his honor, as was Joseph and his family, our other Rally kid for 2008. Matthew, our Rally kid from last year's Nashville fundraiser, was also there with his 3 brothers and his parents. We had several guests show up to help out and donate their time and money to the successful event - thanks to all of you.


By 2:00 almost all of our guests had gone and we realized that RAA 2008 had come to an end. We packed up and went back to Austin and Paul's apartment (which is newly furnished) to collect ourselves and relax a little bit. We ended the day at Nashville's finest mexican restaurant, La Hacienda, for some wonderful food and some reflective stories from the event.

Thanks to all who helped make this trip possible again this year - there are, happily, too many people involved in the success of RAA to thank individually here in this blog. We would, however, like to thank all of our hosts this year for allowing us to keep our costs down, which helps to ensure that your donation goes to fund as much research as possible. Another special thanks to Dean, Nicole and Lindley at the Rally Foundation for starting and maintaining what has turned out to be such a great force in so many peoples' lives - the families and individuals that we have seen during this trip affirm, over and over, that this is true.

And one more thanks to my teammates, Austin and Claire; thanks to Austin for using his creativity and perseverance to start and implement Rally Across America, and thanks to Claire for doing all sorts of groundwork for the trip this year and in years past. There is no telling how many hours these two have devoted to this cause (in addition to their full-time jobs) on a completely volunteer basis. Both have been nominated for and won Presidential Volunteer Service Awards for their work with Rally, and both have helped inspire people all over the nation with their hard work and their passion for accomplishing something great specifically to help others in need - just think what things would be like if EVERY recent college graduate did things like this. They are true role models and it was an honor for me to get to participate in such a great event with these friends of mine.

"Thanks, y'all!"

~Paul