Stuart and Bill went off to a book signing by Alton Brown. Alton Brown is on the Food Network and looks into the science of food when cooking.
They had fun even though they had to wait for some four hours to actually see him – but I think they both agreed it was worthwhile!
 Stu and Alton |  Bill and Alton |
Another sprint tri (400m swim; 14 mile bike; 3 mile run) but this time we had to swim in a lake! We arrived before it was even light and the event seemed more disorganised than normal but eventually I managed to set up my bike on the racks and get my time chip sorted. Stuart and Gretchen watched us swimming in from the opposite bank so they never saw the sign we saw just as we were getting into the water!
“No Swimming. Warning Alligators and Poisonous Snakes!”
Fortunately it was the men in first and I hoped they would scare any of the above off! When we stepped into the water we all sunk up to our knees in mud and I thought I was going to be stuck there! I managed to free myself and kneel instead otherwise when the whistle blew I might not have got away. The water was pretty cold and very brown so I could not see anything. I soon settled into a rhythm and cleared myself of the rest of the pack to avoid being kicked. Every so often I had to look up to check for the course marker buoys. When I climbed out of water I was pretty cold and felt extremely dizzy when trying to get me bike shoes on.
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However, as I was leaving the transition area on my bike I Stuart and Gretchen. I said I was really cold, and Stuart was sympathetic as ever and just said “well, bike harder!”. The crowd near him roared with laughter for I pedalled off in disgust!! Except for some extremely fast men over taking me on my bike I seemed to be passing a number of the girls. The annoying thing was this tri they put our age on the front of our legs rather than the back, so I couldn’t tell if they were girls from my age group.
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The 14 miles went pretty quick and soon it was the run. Oh how I hate the first mile trying to get my legs back to running mode from biking mode. Again I managed to pass a few folk and set my sights on a guy with very long legs who was keeping up a good pace. There was Gretchen and Stuart cheering as I came through the finish line!
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The Oktoberfest Tri was sponsored by a local brewery from Katy called ‘No Label Brewing Company’ so I had a small cup of beer as a reward at about eight in the morning!!
Results: http://www.eztoregister.com/assets/OctoberFestTri11.HTM#19
From Atlanta, Stuart I heading south towards Pensacola, a beach resort on Florida’s panhandle. We drove for about 2.5 hours before finding a Holiday Inn for the evening to stop at. That night we sat in their lounge area for the free beer they had going that evening and watched endless stories about Steve Jobs, Apple CEO, who had just passed away.
We had a minor GPS malfunction on the way to Pensacola because the GPS doesn’t call it Pensacola Beach it calls it Gulf Breeze. After rectifying our wrong direction it then said we still had about 50 miles to got yet we could see we were needing to go just cross the bridge ahead of us. We then realised we had switched off toll roads so rather than direct us over the $1 toll bridge it opted for an enormous detour!
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The sand along Pensacola is white, absolutely white. And the water even though it is the Gulf of Mexico is blue. However, there was quite steep shelf edge and the waves were big so it didn’t look overly inviting although there were people swimming.
We had booked two nights at the Holiday Inn Resort with a room looking over the sea. The resort was quite nice and had its own pool area as well as beach sun beds and umbrellas out in front of the hotel.
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Due to the big waves we opted to sit by the pool and relax. This was going to be two days of taking it easy before heading back home. That night we chose a place to eat the options were pretty limited but it was actually ok.
We left early on Saturday morning as it was approximately 10 hours drive to get home and we stopped off for a quick breakfast at an Ihop (International House of Pancakes!) as that is all we could find (best of a bad bunch) and it took us forever to get served due to the slowest waitress ever. Anyway after that we only stopped when we needed fuel and to change drivers. We had the wonder bu-dum, bu-dum over the Louisiana swamps. The one and only time we saw rain on our two weeks away was when we go back into Texas which was pretty amazing.
Total list of States passed through and visited in 2 weeks (10): Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Florida
Total mileage in 2 weeks: 3,500 miles with only one flat battery incident
http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid=202562720634909943131.0004b5663318c511853b8&msa=0
