The bike ride that wasn't

One of the reasons we decided to schedule our moving date for October was the Skittles Waco Wild West bike ride. As I have mentioned, we have both been on the organizing committee for several years.
The week of the ride happened to also be the week of Hurricane Rita. Erring on the side of caution after Hurricane Katrina, weather forecasters were predicting devastating weather for Texas. Even Waco, hundreds of miles from the Gulf of Mexico, was threatened by chances of high winds and heavy rain. If the storm had tracked as predicted at one point, Waco would have been directly in the path of what would have been at least a tropical storm as it passed over.
Wednesday before the ride, we found out that one of our major sponsors that also hosts our premiere rest stop for the riders, had decided to cancel their rest stop for the safety of the volunteers there. This left the committee in a big dilemma. We have never canceled our ride before. We had 600 + riders preregistered for the event. On the other hand, the supplier of the porta-potties said he didn’t want to put his porta-potties out with the likelihood of hurricane winds. Waco was also fast becoming a destination point for Gulf coast evacuees, to the point that every hotel room in Waco was booked.
So, we took stock of the situation and decided to cancel the ride. A very tough decision, but ultimately the only one that made sense.
Luckily, we decided to cancel before we spent some of the money we usually spend. Some of the T-shirts were printed, but not all. No money had been spent for the police escorts, the fruit and cookies hadn’t been purchased yet and we hadn’t yet gotten the big tent we use for registration.
This did leave us the predicament of contacting over 60 people to let them know of the decision. We had email addresses for many of the riders, so mass emails were sent. Others were called on the phone (my new packet 8 VOIP service was handy there!) Our website was updated to show the cancellation.
Friday night is normally packet pickup. We told people they could come get their T-shirts then. About 100 folks did come. We will be mailing out T-shirts to all the preregistered riders soon.
It was very disappointing to have all our hard work go unused. Waco ended up not having any hurricane weather, but we did get lots of Gulf coast evacuees. All in all, we received high marks from almost all our riders on our decision, the communication to let people know of the cancellation, and our interest in the safety of both our riders and the volunteers involved.