Wednesday 01 April

One can never fully appreciate the work done at the Woodrow Wilson Rehabilitation Centre or the extent of its facilities unless you visit it! The center's aim is to provide vocational retraining and skills for people who have been physically traumatized and disabled in someway or another. Students need to qualify and show potential for rehabilitation, and the center pushes students to take responsibility for their own skill acquisition. It is a 'tough love' environment where students are prepared to enter the workplace as competitors. The centre caters for over 4000 students a year and has more than 300 fulltime employees ranging from Occupational therapists and audiologists to carpentry lecturers and rehabilitation Engineers. They have accommodation facilities for about 350 students at any given time.

We ate at Basic City Luncheonette; a typical greasy spoon for the working class. Henry Ford famously said that one could purchase a Model T in any color as long as it was black. At Basic City you can order a variety of food but it will all be brown. Tasty but brown!

Only because we had some time, Jeff Ward, our host for the day, took us to Gassman Automobile Services, a company which restores classic cars. Some of the cars can spend as long as two years in his workshop before being completely restored. The owner obviously loves what he does and pays attention to every detail. This was every little boys (and girls) dream carshop!

The Virginia Wildlife Centre was the team's final stop of the day's tour before our presentation to Area 4 in the evening. The centre relies on members of the public to bring in injured indigenous animals. The team had hoped to see a few large mammals, a brown bear maybe. This was not to be but we were fortunate to see both a Bald Eagle (America's National Bird, which almost took second place to the wild turkey, if you can believe that) and a Golden Eagle.

The presentation was to our biggest audience, outside of district conference. Some say that it was the fantastic Barrenridge Wine Estate that attracted over 160 people, others suggested that it was the spirit of co-operation between the 5 clubs that had worked so closely together to organize the Homestead Weekend. However, we are convinced that our reputation precedes us! We thoroughly enjoyed presenting to our most responsive crowd thus far.

A major honor was the attendance of Staunton Mayor Lacey King who presented each team member with the key to the city - we will test them all tomorrow evening when we have a team night out!