MS150 – All Roads lead to Austin

I had a meeting with Kelly last Thursday and it became clear that all points on the compass are (for the next few months of course) lead to the MS150.

So to get things started, I thought that I would pitch in spend a few hours stuffing bags that the MS Society will be giving to the riders in the upcoming MS150 with the members of the Mayde Creek High School band.

Organized chaos

The “Green Goodie Bags” were going to be filled with ride information, a mouse pad and a bicycle water bottle for the 13,000 riders.

Ya, that’s a lot of Goodie bags.

As I walked in the school, I could hear the chaos even before I saw the door and it was obvious that my help was probably not going to be required. Things were going so well (and fast!) that the plan to possibly come back and finish the stuffing tomorrow was, shall we say, clearly not going to be necessary.

The room and the kids were a pizza fueled perpetual motion machine. As you can see from the pictures, they had set up several tables with the empty bags at one end, the stuff to go in the bags in the middle, and the bag-o-bags at the other end.

The new system

The plan WAS set to have a person put one thing in the green bag, then hand it off to the next person, then they would put the next item in the bag and finally put the Goodie bag in a bag-o-bags. The process would be repeated until the big bag was full.

If you visualize the scene, that means people standing still at the tables all doing the same thing, over and over. That was, until the kids came up with a better idea.

They decided that it would be more fun to stuff each bag on their own. That meant that they would grab a bag, walk down the line gabbing and stuffing, put the bag in the bag-o-bags, then walk back to the be head of the table.

Wash, rinse and repeat.

Probably more work than necessary but they were having a ton of fun and working faster than anyone expected.

After the bag-o-bags was full, it was taken outside and “placed” in the rental truck. I say “placed” since there were no breakables in the bags, they were heaved in to the truck with flair. Did I mention they were having fun?

Launching the "bags-o-Goodie Bags"

It was really great to see one of those little things that are such a big part of huge events like the 150. I think I’ll put the pictures on my iPhone and show them to some of the riders. Click here to see more pictures…

What’s next? I am thinking about joining other volunteers at one of the MS150 Packet pick up sites… and possible do something cool (and take pictures of course) during the big event!

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