The Final School Day

It's hard to believe that the tour is coming to an end. We have had so many great times and created thousands of memories and now it's ending for another year.

We started off with another rare appearance off our scheduled route. due to scheduling conflicts we were back in Peterborough to visitJames Strath P.S before heading out to Milbrook.

Our day started off with being joined by 3 special guest. The first 2 guest are members of our Western Pedal For Hope team in London Ontario. Don from the London Police Service and Terry from the Ontario Provincial Police spent the first 4 hours of their morning driving from London so they could ride with the team. Our other guest was one of our Special Friends, Ajay.

There is nothing like a super high energy show and some ice cream at 9am to get the students hyper for the rest of the day. What I didn't know about this day is there was some plotting and planning behind the scenes, courtesy of my dear sweet friend Mary from the Canadian Cancer Society.

For those who were not involved I will quickly rewind a couple of days and give you the scoop on how this all started. You see, in the past the team has been know to grab an un-suspecting audience member and bring them up to the front of the school for a little ice cream eating contest. the fun part of that is, once we hand cuff them they rarely get any ice cream in their mouth. The team, okay....maybe just me, smears ice cream all over their face. the kids love it.

Over the last few years we have smeared teachers, police officers, principals and yes, even some Canadian Cancer Society officials. So this year I think everyone coming to see our show was a little on edge thinking they may be called upon to be the victim of a long standing team tradition.

Okay, so now fast forward to this years tour. After some threats, dares and challenges between Mary and I it was decided at the first school, without me knowing, that the team was going to hand cuff me and Mary was going to do the honours of 'smearing' me. So the entire time we were at James Strath, this planning was going on in the background until finally common sense prevailed. You see getting smeared with ice cream is not bad, but having to go all day with sticky melted ice cream all over your cycling gear is.

So it did not take place, but again without me knowing..........(and yes I am the captain, so you would think I would know everything, but this was not the case) the planning was still in the works.

We were off to Milbrook and our second stop was at Milbrook P.S. It was a great ride to Milbrook except for 2 things, the giant hill you have to climb to get into Milbrook, followed by the giant hill you have to climb to get out of Milbrook. Funny how that works, it's like milbrook is in this giant crater.

Our final stop of the day was at North Cavan, where again we climbed a giant hill to get to the school. We were greeted outside by all the students, staff and one more special friend, Tommy was right up front as the team rode in.

A group of students entertained us with a touching poem about the team and the staff treated us with a celebration lunch as they do every year since we began the tour.

I between the poem and the celebration meal the ice cream smearing plot that started in the morning finally took place, but had an interesting twist. Mary appeared at the front of the gym and I was called up to have an ice cream show down. What Mary didn't expect is her plan was about to back fire on her. All the time she was expecting the hand cuffs to be put on me, but they were put on her and I proceeded to keep tradition alive by smearing ice cream all over her. She did get some help from the team because I was also smeared with ice cream, so I guess we both ended up sticky at the end of the day. Ha Ha.

It was all in good fun and Mary is a great sport.

John