Posted on 04/17/2017 2:23:25 PM PDT by cdga5for4
Trekking 500 miles across Spain is no easy task for anyone, but for wheelchair userJustin Skeesuck, achieving the dream seemed nearly impossible. However, Skeesuck’s lifelong best friend, Patrick Gray, simply didn’t accept that idea. “We've done everything together so far. Why not have one more adventure?” Gray told TODAY. “So there was just no other response in my head than yeah, I'll push you.”
That’s exactly what he did — pushing Skeesuck, whom he has known all his life — across northern Spain’s Camino de Santiago trail. Skeesuck, who has Multifocal Acquired Motor Axonopathy, a neuromuscular disease similar to ALS, first got the idea to go on the journey after he watched a travel show about the trail.
Camino de Santiago
First item on the retirement bucket list.
No, I said .50 miles... oh, well.
As someone who has to push wheelchairs often and has been one of the dogs pulling a sled, I think that I would have tried to build my friend a rickshaw. It would have been a lot easier to move that far and we could have hauled better gear.
More here from their local paper.
Gray and Skeesuck were born 36 hours apart in the Idaho border town of Ontario, Ore., in 1975.
“We were friends from the get-go,” Gray said.
They attended the same schools, went to the same church and played the same sports.
“Pat suckered me into playing football one year [in high school]. It was the worst football experience of my life,”Skeesuck said,
Gray added, laughing, “It was the only football experience of your life. The thing was, I just wanted someone worse than me on the team, so I asked him.”
Though Skeesuck stayed in California after college, he and Gray served as best man in each other’s weddings and the couples vacationed together numerous times.
Just the other day I read in a book about the mathematical physicist Freeman Dyson that he once pushed a friend in a wheelchair 50 miles from Cambridge to London in one day.
"Are we there yet?"
"Are we there yet?"
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