We arrived in Lewiston about 4:30 pm today - a hard 18 miles. The first half was through the rural rolling hills and was lovely walking. Many truckers flying by waved or blasted their horns. It seemed like today we had more responses from truckers than usual. The last half of the walk was city with much traffic, noise, impatient drivers and all that goes with it. A man on a motorcyle had an accident right by us at one point and seemed to have been quite injured. A traffic jam caused many cars to stop and he tried to change lanes and clipped another car and then crashed onto the sidewalk just behind me. I'm actually lucky I didn't get hit.
At lunch we were joined by another Buddhist monk from Massachusetts and Jun-san the Japanese nun based in New York. Then a bit later we saw a man walking down the opposite side of the road toward us and he joined the walk. He had seen the front page coverage about the walk in the weekly newspaper in Gray about a week ago. He's going to walk with us for a couple of days. Then a bit later two more people unexpected popped up and joined in. So by the time we got into Lewiston we had a nice sized group.
Lewiston has many African immigrants and as we neared the beautiful Kennedy Park in the downtown area we were given much support by the many people in the park. Maine is such a white state so it was a wonderful thing to see all these people of color giving us such good feedback. A really wonderful experience.
We are being hosted by the Episcopal Church and will have a supper here and sleep on the floor. In the morning we head to Gray for a Methodist Church and another hard floor.
While at our lunch spot today I was interviewed by WERU radio and have already had a phone call from a friend who heard the program and was pleased with it.
No comments:
Post a Comment