Chapter 3: The Walk Begins.

We turned around from the stage and began on our adventure, walking back towards Arlington Ball Park.

You can see some of the walkers taking off, and some of the crew members in their blue t-shirts cheering us on. The red t-shirts are the medical staff, and in particular the man with the straw hat was the medical lead.

The beginning of the walk is nice, because no one is injured, everyone is happy and excited, and the weather is still cool. Either way, I'm a slow walker even on a good day, and I just amble along at my own pace. I watched as pairs of walkers sped by me, "speed-walking" I guess you would call it, and I wondered how many of them were first time walkers, and how many of them would even make it to the end of the walk.

From a distance, we began to hear a car alarm going off, but we couldn't see the car. As we got father down the road, we saw this woman standing in front of her car, cheering us on as she walked. She had her keyring in her hand and she kept setting off her car alarm to cheer for us. We laughed and smiled and said thank you, and some of us wondered if her car would start later on. It did, because fifteen minutes later she drove by us, waving and honking her horn!

Shortly after that woman drove by, we saw the sweep vans gearing up. These vans drive by us all day every day. If we are doing ok, we give them a thumbs-up, and they drive by; if we don't feel like we can walk anymore for whatever reason, we give them a thumbs down and they stop to pick us up. I didn't know it at the time, but the sweep vans would be very busy on this hot weekend.

I stopped for a moment and turned around to take a picture of some of the walkers behind me. They asked everyone to wear the white 3-Day walk t-shirts they had given us on the first day. Some people had the great idea of cutting off the sleeves of the shirts, and some even cut them into tank tops! I wish I had thought of that. It's hard to get the magnitude of the 1,500 walkers from this picture, but at least it shows a few hundred. We were like cattle, corralled onto sidewalks by signs and by the sweep vehicles that drove by. There were also orange t-shirted safety people at the intersections directing us and controlling traffic.

We walked by this parked train, and it made me think of my father, one of the original reasons I did this walk three years ago. I took a picture of it for him.

Arlington Ballpark is right next door to Six Flags, and I snapped this picture of the Six Flags Drive street sign as we walked beneath it.