A Good Cause Rows Past Mount Vernon
Making his way from Miami to New York in a 15-foot rowboat in an attempt to raise $50,000 for Alzheimer’s research, Lewis Colam, 24, stopped at Mount Vernon late last week for a meal, night’s rest and quick tour before heading up the Potomac River to Washington, D.C.
Colam, who left his job as a management consultant in London to take on the 1,400-mile adventure, had no previous rowing experience and began his journey back on March 3, mapless and compassless. To date he’s raised $24,220.
Surviving on a diet of oatmeal, canned fruit and pasta, and sleeping most nights in his boat, Colam has encountered alligators, a cargo ship that nearly cut his vessel in half, and manatees that tipped over his boat along the lonely journey.
“My friends and family thought it was a joke” says Colam, who is British and wanted to see the Southern states and Statue of Liberty in particular. The toll that Alzheimer’s can take became particularly real for him when he watched a former girlfriend’s grandmother suffer from it.
Along the way he’s met a variety of normal Americans as well as TV chef Paula Deen, who along with her tugboat-captain husband, took Colam in for three nights and fed him. Being from Britain, Colam didn’t know who Deen was, but says he began to pick up that she was famous when he saw pictures of her with Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey inside the house.
He still has a ways to go before making it to New York. If you’d like to help Colam reach his goal of $50,000, which he will be donating to the Fischer Center for Alzheimer’s Research Foundation, check out his website www.iamfinechallenge.org and donate here. Or if you’d like to follow along with Colam’s adventure, catch him in the local news, on Twitter, on Facebook and on the GPS tracking portion of his website.
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Short URL: http://thepresidency.us/?p=16334
Posted by RobertButler
on May 22 2012. Filed under George Washington.
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