By Nancy C. Nelson, POF Supporter
 This will be the third year of Three Legs Across America. POF supporters Nancy Nelson and Dan Fender will start in Rawlins, Wyoming, where they left off in their multi-year tandem bicycle ride across the U.S. Nancy is a below-the-knee amputee, hence the Three Legs moniker. Friends, family and POF supporters have made generous donations in honor of this ride, all earmarked for artificial legs for Vietnamese amputees.
Here are a few highlights about this year’s upcoming ride:
We’ll ride across the highest pass on our entire journey: Hoosier Pass, 11,542 feet, east of Breckenridge, Colorado.
We’ll cross the half-way mark of our 4,248 mile ride (2005: 700 miles; 2006: 735 miles). We’ve already crossed the half-way mark of our original goal of raising $100,000 for Vietnamese amputees.
We’ll be riding a new bicycle. Those of you who’ve been reading about this adventure since the beginning know that a weld broke on our original frame on the second day of our ride. Thanks to the kindness of numerous strangers, the break was repaired and we were on our way in a matter of hours, but after thousands of miles there was just no way the original bike was going to make it all the way to the east coast.
And, we’ll at least get started on our way across Kansas. Neither of us has ever been there before; we’re hoping it’s really as flat as everyone says it is.
A specific starting date for this year’s three week ride hasn’t been set yet, but it will be sometime in late August. It’s a balancing act between leaving early enough to miss snow in the Rockies, but late enough to avoid the heat, humidity, thunderstorms and bugs of the mid-west. And we never know quite where we’ll end – it needs to be somewhere we can box up the bike and get it and ourselves back to Olympia, Washington, our home base.
You can help support the great work of POF without getting saddle sore! Be a part of this great adventure by donating online today at www.pofsea.org. Please be sure to note that it is for Three Legs Across America. Three hundred dollars will buy a new leg for an amputee in Vietnam. The first $5,000 raised will be matched dollar for dollar. All donations are welcome and appreciated by us, by POF and most of all, by the people in Vietnam who will once again be able to walk.
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