92-year-old Rosemary Sorce of Boise, Idaho is not letting her age discourage her from wanting to go on bike rides, something she has always loved doing throughout her life. Her own family built her what they call a ‘blessing bike’ and it’s a cargo-style bicycle that is fit to carry Rosemary along her travels instead of having her pedal.
On the back of the seat rests the remainder of the bicycle that someone else is in charge of pedaling. Rosemary just needs to sit there, relax, and enjoy the ride! It was Rosemary’s daughter, Jill Houser, that came up with the idea for the ‘blessing bike’ after seeing a video online.
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Jill recalled the moment she saw the circulating Facebook video and had the idea to build her own blessing bike for her mother.
“I was on Facebook and saw a video from Copenhagen. A volunteer built a bike and was taking seniors all over the place, and I was watching the looks on those people’s faces and then looked at my mom on the couch, who I would take out in a wheelchair and then said to Wade (her husband), is there any way you can make something like this? And he said like he always does… I think I could make that!”
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Jill and her husband, Wade, bought a cargo bike on Craigslist, repainted it, and modified it into the cargo-style bicycle that is represented in the photos. They gave it to Rosemary for her 92nd birthday and she absolutely loved it.
“I’m 92 and hell I want to keep going, oops I shouldn’t have said that, I want to keep going,” Rosemary says, “Look at the sky. You know you don’t see all this in the car.”
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The blessing bike isn’t just a huge hit with Rosemary and her family… it’s also a huge hit wherever she goes! People just love seeing this 92-year-old woman getting around on her bike.
“We had a man stop us on the street, and he pulled over in a parking lot and physically stopped us on the road and just started crying and said ‘I wish I had this experience for my mom, how do you build a bike like this? What do you do?’,” Jill recalls, “So I think this isn’t just about us, it’s about what we can do we can all do for our elderly family members in helping them experience this season in their life at the very end as much as possible.”
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I like the freedom to be able to go outside! t makes you feel good and you feel loved! You’re not just sitting around,” Rosemary says, “It’s heavenly and that must be what heaven is like, just to know that you are loved.”
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