AIDS Walk 2005

The weather was spectacular for the NBAIDS Walk yesterday; 22 degrees and sunny. As I mentioned before, half the money raised will stay here in NB helping people living with HIV/AIDS and their families, and for prevention programs; and half will go to the Stephen Lewis Foundation, doing the same kind of work in Africa.

The walk started from Saint Thomas University. STU shares a campus with the larger University of New Brunswick; I tried to take a photo that would give an idea of the size of the crowd, but the campus is terraced and full of small courtyards, which made it near-impossible. This captures a good chunk of the folks, though. I'd estimate there were about 500 walkers in all...

Again, when it came time to stroll down the long hill of the campus, I was only able to capture a portion of the long string of walkers in one shot. Here, though, you can see the walkers snaking down the sidewalk as it meanders down the hill and curves away to the right and out of frame.

The weather, as I said, was perfect, the walk scenic, and we wound up at beautiful Officer's Square in downtown Fredericton - and here are the photos of the happy duo to prove it.

Then, because the route for some crazy reason wasn't a circuit, Husband turned around and walked back up the hill to pick up the car. Since the whole walk was my idea in the first place, he is totally my hero for not only agreeing to participate, raising money, driving us to the site (my old health problems meant the 5k walk drained my entire reserve of energy), walking, and retrieving Yvette the Honda afterwards (Saturday afternoon bus service sucks here).

So as someone who doesn't do a lot of 5k walks, I have aches today in places in my calves and butt I didn't know had muscles; but we raised some money for AIDS prevention and research and had a hell of a lot of fun doing it.

If people knew what an absolute rush you get out of participating in something like this, they would compete to participate, for purely selfish reasons...

ronnie