Lesa Black: “It’s a hugely emotional event. It just makes you incredibly grateful for what you have and makes you want to do that much more.”
Andrew Black: “We get a lot of people that pull off to the side of the road … and salute us, thank us and clap for what we’re doing … It’s kind of a tearjerker once you start rolling into St. Jude. It sets in pretty quick as to why we’re doing this when patients, doctors and nurses are lining the street within St. Jude and welcoming us onto campus.”
Lesa Black: “There’s a lot of people that you meet through [the 500-mile drive] that we would have never had that connection with before … We do this for the kids of St. Jude. The connection is the car, but the passion is helping sick kids.”
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Doug Parrott: “When you walk in [to St. Jude’s], it doesn’t feel like a regular hospital. It’s bright, welcoming and has a sense of happiness. No parent wants to hear their child has cancer, but if that time would ever come, St. Jude is the place to be. It definitely shocked us and made an impact.”
Andrew Black: “This is a fundraising event for St. Jude. This definitely causes some commotion along the way—when you have a police-led escort of 130 to 140 cars lined up going about 40 miles an hour, it becomes about 2 1/2 to 3 miles long.”
Lesa Black: “One year we had a little kiddo who was a St. Jude patient who asked if he could sit in the car with us … He had his hands up on the dash, and after leaving, we could still see those handprints … we kept those on the dash for months, because that was a reminder to us.”