Cyclist down

A Gulf Breeze man riding his bicycle cross-country to raise awareness and funds for Gulf oil spill victims was killed Wednesday morning on State Road 20 in Bay County when he was hit by a pickup truck.

Roger Grooters, 66, who lived in Tiger Point with his wife, Vicki, was on the final leg of his trip from Oceanside Beach, Calif., to Jacksonville when he was struck at approximately 8:55 a.m. while pedaling along State Road 20 between Ebro and State Road 77.

The journey, which Grooters was chronicling in an Internet blog, started Sept. 10. The total distance was to be about 3,200 miles. Grooters was about 200 miles from his destination.

www.gulfbreezenews.com/news/2010-10-07/Front_Page/Gulf_Breeze_cyclist_killed_during_crosscountry_jou.html.

Roger Grooters blog can be viewed here: rogerxcountry.blogspot.com. There is currently information regarding memorial services and donations to the Gulf Coast Oil Spill fund at www.gbumc.org.

An explaination of his fund raising in his own words can be viewed here: Roger’s Cross Country Ride.

About big jonny

The man, the legend. The guy who started it all back in the Year of Our Lord Beer, 2000, with a couple of pages worth of idiotic ranting hardcoded on some random porn site that would host anything you uploaded, a book called HTML for Dummies (which was completely appropriate), a bad attitude (which hasn’t much changed), and a Dell desktop running Win95 with 64 mgs of ram and a six gig hard drive. Those were the days. Then he went to law school. Go figure. Flagstaff, Arizona, USA

4 Replies to “Cyclist down”

  1. What a fascinating thing it is, this thing that we do. Our sport is doped to the gills and coming apart at the seams (see posts on Contador and Landis below) and our rank and file show their interest in promoting good deeds and regularly get run down by motorists.

    The obvious conclusion? God hates the bicycle and wants us to drill, baby.

  2. …that, e, would be a sacrilegious conclusion…hard to grasp a better meaning, i know, but sometimes it’s about never giving up…

    …vigilance & having faith in stuff you believe in, even if it’s ‘just’ cycling means you can’t lose hope…

    …poor guy had ridden across the whole country, only to become fodder for senseless stupidity within spitting distance of home…

    …my heart goes out to the man’s family & friends…

  3. E, not to mention the horrible irony of a man raising money to offset the damage caused by our utter and complete reliance on fossil fuels is then run down and killed by a vehicle with an internal combustion engine.

  4. Some of the locals around here are talking to the widow about completing the man’s journey. If she is alright with it, they will roll out from his accident scene, and ride into Jacksonville in his honor, either as a group, or relay style.