Comments
Update 29 January 2014 The newest profile picture is of me teaching bike safety skills to 5th graders in Kansas City. I've been working a little with BikeWalkKC, an advocacy and education not for profit in Kansas City. http://bikewalkkc.org We did a Habitat Build in Poland followed by a Bus tour of the Baltics and St. Petersburg in August 2014 http://caroline-europe14.blogspot.com Update 2 July 2014. Here's my latest bike tour blog: http://caroline-rivers.blogspot.com I did not visit any classmates this time, but I will be in Indianapolis in October for a conference, and I hope to meet up with Sharla Klahr and Ann Price while I am there. After graduating high school, I spent 3 semesters at St. Mary's College at N.D.; then in the middle of sophomore year I transferred to I.U. at Bloomington. I graduated in 1965 with a degree in History and headed immediately to Cambridge, MA to begin working on an MAT in Social Studies. I was in a one year program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, interning for one semester at Belmont H.S. I then worked until late 1969 teaching high school, first in Wakefield and then in Concord. MA. I married George Helmkamp, a graduate student in Biochemistry in 1967. When he completed his degree, we moved to San Antonio, TX where he did his three years of Army service at the Institute of Surgical Research, aka "The Burn Center." With two small children in tow, we moved to Utrecht, the Netherlands in February 1973 where he completed a post doctoral fellowship and I learned to cope with rain, cycling with small children, learning to speak Dutch, and meeting other international women. We moved to Kansas City in 1975 where he joined the faculty of the Kansas University Medical Center. We've been here ever since, living in a 99 year old home in the heart of the city on the Missouri side of the state line. Our kids attended and graduated from the Kansas City Public School District, and after I worked a few years in an alternative school, I joined the district as a Junior High/Middle School teacher in 1984. I retired in 2008. During my teaching life I taught Social Studies, was very active in the Missouri Geographic Alliance, and spent the last ten years as a "computer applications" teacher which means I taught my students how to use a computer, not how to program it! Along the way I coached my daughter's H.S. soccer team and worked in professional development, especially in geography. In the early 90's we spent a year in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada where George worked in a lab and I took classes at the University. In the mid nineties, we began to ride our bicycles more seriously. My husband commuted the short distance to the med center for 33 years, and the last few years I cycled to my teaching job a couple days a week. This always impressed my students. The last few years we have taken vacations on our bicycles which is how I got to Owensboro, KY to visit with Suzanne Smith Guyer and to Lexington, VA to see Ann McLean Massie last summer. They both put our bikes in their garages, sent us to the showers, and let us stay overnight in their homes. They fed us well, too. In 1998 our teacher's union asked me to stand for election for the Kansas City Public School Retirement System, and I have been serving as a trustee ever since. And yes, I WAS paying a lot of attention to the events in Madison, WI last winter! I'm looking forward to attending the reunion in August, arriving on Amtrak with my folding bicycle and husband in tow. We'll be staying at the Residence Inn on N. Niles quite near downtown. Update: In October I visited with Joyce Lemontree Judd and her friend Marshall at the home in Maryland. She and I visited some lovely historic places around St. Mary County. Thanks, Joyce! Update: George and I went to Turkey over the New Year. http://caroline-istanbul.blogspot.com 2014 Update: George and I have been doing a lot of traveling since we retired. These trips have included bike tours where we carry our own "stuff." We have also done several trips with Global Village, the international arm of Habitat for Humanity. When we travel, I take a tablet computer along in my bicycle panniers and look for wifi along the way. I don't have a smart phone, but I find that camp sites, coffee shops and public libraries are available. In some instances I've actually sat outside on the library steps to catch their wifi. Here are some of my bike blogs: http://transamtrio.blogspot.com This blog covers 2 years of a projected ride across the country. We finished the first two legs going from Yorktown, VA to Missouri and then Rawlins, WY to Kansas City. On our last leg out of Rawlins heading for Oregon, George and I got sick and had to give it up. Before the class reunion in 2011 we cycled on our folding bikes on Cape Cod: http://www.crazyguyonabike.com/doc/cape Last summer we did a quick tour of the Outer Banks http://www.crazyguyonabike.com/doc/dahonOBX And in the fall of 2013 we rode on two trails from Pittsburgh PA to DC http://caroline-gap.blogspot.com The three Habitat Builds were in Malawi, Sri Lanka and Bolivia http://caroline-malawi.blogspot.com http://caroline-lanka.blogspot.com http://caroline-cocha.blogspot.com I'm still serving as a trustee on our teacher pension plan and I got certified to teach bicycle safety from the League of American Bicyclists and I've been doing some teaching in 5th grade classes through our local advocacy group, BikeWalk KC. If you ever come through KC, give us a ring. We are the only Helmkamps in the phone book.
