It feels impossible to me that we’ve only been in Florida for 4 days. We’ve already made so many great connections and getting started volunteering is finally making all of our plans and ambitions for the year feel real.

We woke bright and early Wednesday morning for the trip to Richmond airport. Back in January, heading to another airport we were in the car for ~27 hours (https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/01/04/i-95-shutdown-virginia/) so we asked Evan’s brother to take us ahead of schedule, just to be safe.

We arrived in Florida that afternoon and everyone who found out I was from Colorado teased that we brought the cold rainy weather with us. We were eager to start making connections so we headed to a meeting for the Rotary Club of Coral Springs-Parkland. It was a complete chance and absolute blessing that their guest speaker for the evening was Mr. Peter Verbeeck, a former District Governor of Rotary District 6990. Mr. Verbeeck spoke about the importance of donating to The Rotary Foundation as well as about how Rotary can and must increase its membership to sustain itself. After his speech, Evan and I were able to connect with him and he was able to pass along our story and contact information to his network.

Through my connection with Mr. Verbeeck, I have ended up being connected with Mr. Ron Janssen (Former District Governor 6980) and Mrs. Kelsey Mitchell (District Governor Nominee 6960). I got to speak to them about our travel year goals and we hope to meet them both later.

On Thursday we spent a lot of time doing more research on Rotary Clubs in our area and in the areas most affected by Hurricane Ian. We made a list of meetings and events we hope to attend and started researching the clubs involved with different services related to our areas of interest. We also got our social medias launched. Thanks to Evan, you can follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and/or TikTok.

Friday morning was spent networking from a coffee shop making calls to find Rotarian hosts closer to the hurricane affected zone. The rest of the day was spent getting settled into our AirBnB stay and finally getting to get ourselves groceries.

On Saturday we got to finally do what we really hoped to do when we set off on this adventure, help people. We joined up with the Weston Rotary Club to carpool across the Everglades for a partnership with the North Fort Myers Rotary Club. We spent the day helping a Rotarian from North Fort Myers clean out her house, saving what was salvageable and helping her remove the furniture and items that unfortunately couldn’t be saved. We are so grateful to have had the opportunity to help but there is still so much work to be done. Rotary is helping not just to find and bring volunteers to job sites but also collecting donations if you are able to help: https://rotary6990.org/disaster-relief/

We’ve spent Sunday resting up for a hectic next few days of networking and I’m excited to update all of you Wednesday!