Sights Unseen Tour Blog

Well, we have just returned from yet another trip to St. Jude. We left Thursday evening and had surgery early Friday morning. Dr. Fleming had to repair her left eye lid because it wouldn't hold her eye in. He pulled the bottom lid up and then pulled the top down but then found out he didn't have enough skin so he had to borrow skin from her only ear. Her left eye is now patched so that the graft will lay flat for ten days to heal properly. The ear has about 6-8 stitches.

She did so well, though. As soon as she came out of the local, she was up and about. She had very little pain and only took one dose of regular Tylenol yesterday. We flew home last night. She is now in the Christmas shopping mood. We will have to go back to Memphis on the 9th to have it all looked at on the 10th, and if the graft is healed, she will get another eye. If not, we will have to wait another week. And so goes another Christmas season in the house of Gilley. Hope yours is much less complicated!

Oh, on a side note, as usual, we now have more cute and sweet stories to tell. After we flew in, we decided to make a detour down Brainerd Road to go through the new Starbucks. As we passed Lanham's, I asked her if she wanted to stop and use her gift card that the church had given her for graduation. We are never that way together. So we turned around and went back. We had no more than entered the store when a lady approached us and talked to Sam about what an inspiration she was and how she had been following the website. I noticed that she had a Channel 3 shirt on.

After we talked for awhile, she asked if she could buy Sam a Bible. I told her that she, of course, couldn't see a regular one and she said that it didn't matter, to just go back and pick whatever Sam wanted. So off they go to look at audio bibles. After much dicussion, they picked out an 80 CD version that is read by many famous actors. Now Sam can download it to her MP3 player and take it to New York with her. Now if that wasn't a God thing! Here we were, not even planning on going that way at all. It all happened so suddenly! After the lady left the store, one of the employees there told us that this woman always finds someone there to buy a bible for. We were in shock at all of it. This lady listens to God and obeys! Oh how I wish I would do that.

We began to listen to it in the car, and it is truly awesome. You don't want to cut it off. Sam is so excited and I can't wait for her to finish it so that I can hear it too. And to think that this lady said Sam blessed her when she was blessing us! A perfect stranger to us! God is everywhere! So watch, it may happen to you! I hope it does.

- Susie

Well, it’s over! I am able to sit down (no small feat) and give you a brief summary of our trip. It took a while to catch up on things at the office and recover some use of my legs.

Our send off spaghetti supper was a huge success with music, food, tributes, videos, and many friends, family and volunteers.

We had fantastic weather, few mechanical problems and absolutely no accidents thanks to the hundreds of people dedicated to praying. We had a warming sun everyday of the trip with mornings just cool enough for a light jacket. Besides two flats, there were no problems with the bicycles and no one even came close to being in an accident despite heavy traffic in Murfreesboro, Nashville, and Memphis, even though most days we were on roads with 55 and even 65 MPH speed limits.

There are many stories and I can’t wait to tell about people stopping us along the route as they saw Samantha on TV, or read about her in the paper. The momentum was high at our send off as (Congressman) Zach Wamp delivered a moving speech about Samantha. Then things just kept snowballing from there as more people heard about our ride. The days were very hectic, beginning at 7 a.m., with breakfast followed by Libby shuttling us from the RV to our starting point for the day. After filling water bottles and putting granola bars in our pockets, we began pedaling. Libby leap-frogged the riders all day in her car carrying water, tools and tubes and shooting pictures for the blog as she went ahead a few miles and waited on the team to pass then she would drive a few miles again and wait. When Austin and Steve were not riding with us, they were busy breaking down the camp and moving the RV another 40 to 50 miles closer to Memphis. They normally arrived at the next location and got set up only minutes before we arrived. The afternoon was filled with showers, washing clothes, adjusting bicycles, blog updates, uploading pictures, Ibuprofen, and setting up for the next day.

Our pilots did a great job of powering the tandem and kept Samantha from getting too sore. We were always concerned about dehydration, soreness and exhaustion (for Samantha, not the pilots). I told the pilots that they were replaceable! Everyone did a great job and she is probably healthier and in better shape now than she has been in years.

The highlight of the trip had to be the pilot’s dinner on Sunday night and the ride into downtown Memphis the next day. The pilot’s dinner was held at Dr. Lilly’s house, on the east side of Memphis, after the Sunday ride that put us just inside the city limits. We cooked out on her deck and told stories about our rides. Samantha gave the pilots a keepsake and told a funny story about each pilot. Monday’s ride was great as we met in Eads, Tennessee, with riders from the Memphis Hightailers club, many of our pilots, and five members of Memphis’ finest that escorted our group the final 36 miles. There were four motorcycle escorts and one police cruiser and they stopped traffic at every red light and cleared every intersection to allow Samantha’s parade to enter Memphis in style. One of the officers told Sam that they had practiced this several weeks earlier when some guy named Bush came to Memphis so they could get everything organized and then they would be ready when she arrived.

Then the coup de grâce was when we stopped at Overton Park, where we met up with Samantha’s friend Ana. I took Ana from her wheelchair and placed her into a carriage that I pulled behind my bike for the ride from Overton Park to St. Jude Hospital. Ana has a rare disease that has left her blind and unable to walk because of brittle bones. She was determined to participate in the ride and pulling her seven miles was hardest thing and the best thing that I did (Look at Samantha’s tribute to Ana http://www.samslife.org/ana.php).

The money is still coming in and I hope to make it to $50,000 as the total raised before its’ over. We are still getting funds in and we are somewhere in the mid forties now.

There will be one last hoorah. Jody Cox, with DV8 Productions, is editing the documentary that he has been filming for the past 6 months. When the final cuts are made, we are planning a World Premier Event, possibly at the Rave Theatre, in East Ridge, where we hope to tell more stories about the trip and then debut the documentary film. That will also be a good time to give an accounting of the money raised and money spent. I will be in touch when we get all of that worked out.

Until then, thanks so much for everything that all of our supporter did to help us out, and thanks to those who are still working.

- Uncle Barry