The last full day on the mainland

Delta is made up of three communities - Ladner, North Delta and Tsawwassen - and Tsawwassen is the one out on the corner, where the municipality's southern boundary at Boundary Bay and the United States border runs down to meet the Strait of Georgia on the west. Getting here from Tilbury means 10.8 miles across the farmland that still covers more than half of Delta's 180 square kilometres. It is the last full day of walking on the mainland.

The ferry terminal is the reason the route bends this way. BC Ferries gives its Tsawwassen terminal the address 1 Ferry Causeway, Delta, out at the end of the causeway that reaches into the strait. The Day 25 crossing leaves from there.

An unrelated transplant runs through a long sequence, and most of it is out of any one person's hands. Someone answers a questionnaire. A kit is mailed and mailed back. A lab does the HLA typing. A registry holds the tissue type until a search runs and finds it. Canadian Blood Services describes that sequence, and the only part of it that belongs to any one person is the first step. Jada Bascom was one month old at her diagnosis and seven months old at her transplant, and the person who matched her was Torsten Huber, in Germany.

The foundation is not a registry. It cannot type anyone, mail a kit, or say who qualifies. What it can do is say where to go, and on this part of the route that is Canadian Blood Services - 17 to 35, in good general health, willing to be a donor to any patient in need.