PALM 2011 Has Filled

On Saturday we had 61 riders, on Tuesday we had 330 riders, on Wednesday we had 630 riders, and on Thursday, Jan 20, we received the applications for 143 more riders. PALM for 2011 has filled. There is still some discussion but it looks like if your application has a postmark of Jan 18 or earlier you are on, otherwise you are not. This will bring the total number of people on the ride to about 780. (This doesn't include staff, SAGs, and truck drivers). Our cutoff is 700 riders so this puts us well over the cutoff even if 50 riders cancel.

PALM is run by an all volunteer staff who do it because we love PALM. It is hard for us to turn anyone away from PALM, something we love. 700 riders is about the limit that the schools we use can handle. Any more and it is long meal lines and cold showers for sure. When PALM started, it used to have a northern and southern route and had over 1000 riders. It was chaos. It was hard to find (volunteer) staff who could run the extra 4 sites. It doubled everything including the chance of something going wrong. I do the registration now and I can tell you that not that many people did PALM more than once in those days, leading me to believe that the rider experience was not that great. Now there are lots of people who do PALM 3, 4 or 5 times even entire families. The PALM experience seems to be a lot better. So 700 is not an arbitrary cutoff instead it's the maximum number of riders that experience has shown us that we can handle and still deliver a good rider experience.

So the best that we can hope for is to give everybody the same chance to get on PALM. This year I staggered the mailing. I sent the applications to the out of state and  West Michigan riders a day early. I hoped that everyone would receive their applications by Jan 15. (I have already heard from people who didn't.) I put the application on the website on Jan 15 (at midnight) so that if you didn't have an application mailed to you (or didn't receive it yet) you could download it. And we are hoping to use the postmark on the applications we receive to figure who is on and who is not. This would be fairer for out of state and West Michigan riders.

For the people who didn't make it onto PALM this year, you will be receiving your checks and our regrets next week. We know you won't be happy. We are not happy if we can't do PALM. Try not to call the PALM phone number and complain to Ellie. She's on the DL and may not be able to do PALM herself. As I mentioned before, Vickie and Ellie are contacting everyone who is on the ride to tell them they made it. It will be weeks before they receive their confirmation letters and this will cut the suspense.

One final word: PALM does not have a waiting list. Instead we accept more than our cutoff (we'll be accepting 780 this year) and pray that enough people cancel to get us down to a number we can handle. Thank you for your interest in PALM.