Day 1, part one

We all woke up far before the alarms rang. Well, one of my two roommates did, and then I was rustled awake. I groggily found my clothes. Turned on the TV to see what the weather was going to be. I guess I didn't pay much attention to the temperature, only to see if it was going to rain or not. On the national map, there were clouds almost everywhere--except over Texas!

We had to be on the buses with all our stuff at 5:30 a.m. ! We made it, with time to spare. We ate some kolaches from the day before. Sort of. I knew I had to eat. I was also too excited and too nervous to eat. The people coordinating the buses had tons of food ordered. It looked good. Not much of it could I actually imagine eating.

Found some of our walking pals and loaded the buses.

That's when I called mom. At that time, she was 13 hours ahead of us, so she was just on her way to dinner or something. There was tons going on around me, so it was a little hard to focus on what she was saying, but I was trying to tell her of all the things going on around me. I knew I was going to cry this weekend, but I didn't know it'd start that early! Good tears, though. Nervous, excited, I miss mom tears.

Once we got to Southfork, we had to take our bags to one of the luggage trucks. We huddled close, looked for friends, stood around, tried to get warm. It was 36 degrees the morning we started!! (Luckily we didn't know that till that night!)

They called us over to the opening ceremonies, and we all corralled in that direction, anticipating what was going to happen next....

The leaders of this whole big shebang talked to us, told us how great we were, all the things we needed to hear. We itched to get going. We stretched. We Screamed. We yelled. We cried as a few survivors walked up a platform. They held hands, tears fell from their cheeks.

Eventually, finally, the let us go.

The sun was finally coming up, we walked by several places famous to South Fork. We finally made it to the edge of the gates, and to the road. And started. Really and truly started walking down the street. All 2400 of us.