PALM Filling Fast

The applications are still coming in. Currently 571 riders have sent in their applications. Our limit is 700 riders. It looks like the ride will close Tuesday or Wednesday. If you mail your application today, you may or may not get on PALM depending on your geographic proximity to Ann Arbor. (The people we mailed applications to in England and Norway are in trouble.) Mail the application in anyway. We don't keep a waiting list. Instead we accept 50 or so riders over the 700 limit, generally by accepting all applications on the cutoff date. Then we count on cancellations to bring us down to the 700 limit. Since we started reaching the rider limit, about 50 riders cancel every year: things come up in June that you couldn't know in February/March. In the years where we didn't fill early, we had about 15 cancellations.

No January thaw this year, but February is starting out nicely: it's 33 degrees and the sun is shining. I don't remember the last time it was above freezing. The paper said that we've already gotten twice as much snow as an average winter but it seems a lot more since none of it has gone away. What we've gotten (42 inches of snow so far) in SE Michigan is nothing compared to west Michigan with their lake affect snow, but with the cold, our mobility has really been affected. We seem to be in a snow cave.

We did get out to see the Ann Arbor Folk Festival last night at a sold out Hill Auditorium. One of the headliners was Pete Segeer who is 80 years old. He was in a band with his grandson and Woody Guthrie's granddaughter. The highlight of the evening was Pete Segeer lining out Amazing Grace, doing the call, and the entire audience of 4000 doing the response. That was followed by all the performers and all of the audience singing This Land Is Your Land. It was amazing. I felt sorry for the performers that had to follow.