Riding for Roses

The Children’s Hospital of Austin Child/Life staff held a party for school-aged cancer surivors at the Texas Disposal System Exotic Game Ranch. What an awesome place for a cancer event. Texas Disposal Systems is not your everyday ordinary garbage company or trash dump operator. Just north of their dump near Creedmoor, TX, the have the TDS Exotic Game Ranch and Pavilion where they hold invited guest events of various kinds. Someone over at TDS must be a huge supporter of cancer survivors as they’ve had events there for the Lance Armstrong Foundation, the Cattle Barrons’ Ball for the American Cancer Society, and several children’s cancer events for the Children’s Hospital of Austin.

The party lasted from 11-2 and Spencer wanted to be there promptly. I knew the way since this was the same location as the Peloton Appreciation Dinner last October, so we just headed down and got into the ranch about 5 minutes before 11. We were the first non-staff people to arrive. As we later learned, several people got pretty lost because of a misplaced decimal point in the directions (said to go 8 miles instead of 0.8 on the last road) so people drive right past the entrance before they were even looking for it. Spencer and I went out back to explore the pavilion grounds and I told him about the activities we’d had a the Peloton dinner. We met a young cancer survivor about Spencer’s age, Mikala, her parents and her brother Adrian, who is 9. Mikala was very quiet and Spencer wound up clicking with her brother instead. It’s great to see kids of different ages play together and the boys had a wonderful time.

After lunch, we had “Mad Joanna” doing science experiments combined with entertainment. She demonstrated combustion with a magic trick where she lit a card on fire and quickly threw it in a covered container. She did a cool demonstration of the Bernoulli effect by filling a 10 foot long paper tube with air using only one breath. Then came the dry ice. Loads of fun with cooling things and icy soap bubbles that vaporized when touched. I’m not sure any of the science stuck, but it was fun and laid a foundation of inquiry.

Next came the tour. We loaded all the kids and parents into a school bus and Justin (I believe Justin Gregory, son of one of the TDS founders) drove us on a tour of the ranch and the dump. On the ranch tour we saw dozens of animals including bison, emu, eland, black swans, zebras, addax, lechwe, rhea, oryx, and wildebeast. My dinky cell phone camera couldn’t get good pictures of anything far away, but the Exotic Game Ranch and Pavilion has good pictures and descriptions.

After we drove through the ranch, the bus went into the dump area and we got a brief tour of the garbage dump. I have to say, this is not as bad as you might think. First, for pure entertainment, we got to see the metal compactor where they were crushing large appliances (a washer and dryer while we were there) that had been stripped of all useful material. After crushing the appliance, they sell the scrap metal. Justin covered a number of ways they reduce the trash going into the dump. When people bring in individual carloads or trailer loads of junk, the TDS people sort through and sell anything usable. They recycle or compost what they can and only the remainder goes to the dump. We went up the hill to the open face of the dump where they were burying trash that day. The surprising thing was how little it smelled. As we approached and a few kids said “ooh, that stinks” Justin said “that’s the smell of money.” He also told us they have a fairly small open face, a 140 ton machine is constantly compacting it, and they bury the open face before it has much time to smell bad. Lastly we toured the composting area where the real smells are – rotting vegetation to make compost for TDS to resell back to some of the very same people who brought the trash in. The smell of money indeed.

On the way home, we took a small adventure tour through the country south and southwest of Austin before returning home. The most interesting part of this was how good Spencer was at keeping track of where we were. It reminds me of when I was a kid and we used to go on “Daddy let’s get lost” car rides on Sunday and figure out our way home.

Spring Break with a pause in chemotherapy has been just awesome. We had a trip to the Austin Zoo and a couple of visits to the health club earlier in the week when it was raining. Tomorrow, we will visit some state parks if the weather holds.