Hello; 

I rode my seventh MS150 Bike Tour last weekend.  It was a grand ride.  I have posted some pictures and my GPS tracks of the two days ride at the following URL:

http://www.radgrafix.com/~zachcox/2004_MS150

On Saturday I rode with my sister Laviece and we had a really nice 75 mile ride down east of New Bern.

On Sunday I rode with John Tracy another member of the Emerald Express Bike Team (there are four of us this year) and we had a really nice 75 mile ride on Sunday.

John Tracy and David Sakell, the other two members of our team, both rode the ‘century-loop’ on Saturday.  They even put in 11 extra ‘bonus-miles’ on Saturday due to a missed turn on one of the century-loops.  On Sunday David rode another century ride and that gave him a total of 212 miles for the weekend. Congratulations to David for his first ‘double-century’ bike ride.

This year’s ride was the biggest ever there were over 1300 riders.  I was proud to wear rider number 45.  This is a number that my supporters earned for me by donating to the ride last year.

As many of you all know I did not send out fund raising email messages before the ride.  I contributed the minimum fee $200.00 to the ride myself this year.  I rode in The American Lung Association’s Big Ride Across America this summer and many of folks in this email pledged to that ride.   For that reason I’m not ‘officially’ hitting you all up for a second donation.

However, I would greatly appreciate any donations you would like to make to me riding my "Seventh Year In A Row MS150 Ride".  This year I rode with a tag under my number that proclaimed “I’m riding for Bruce”.  Bruce is in the office right next to me at work and as a very acute case of MS.  He told me before I rode that he thought that the Eastern North Carolina Chapter of the National MS Society was a super bunch of folks and he knew of many programs that they have to help folks out.  Bruce is one of the lucky ones, in one way, he has good health insurance through our company but knows of some folks with MS who have for one reason or another lost their health insurance and have to stop taking the some of the very expensive medicines that are necessary to control this disease.

If you want to contribute please send me a check made out to the National MS Society or you can visit the online site:

https://www.nationalmssociety.org/nct/home/ and click on the “E-Pledge” Icon and enter Zach Cox and North Carolina for the state and pledge that way.

Thank you for you support over the years.  You all are a grand bunch of folks.

Zach