Savannah

Savannah is really quite beautiful but ironically we didn't manage to take many pictures. I think this is because there is no single vista or point of interest that captures it all; rather every street is a charming mix of ancient, moss-covered oak trees and stately, historic mansions.

We spent the afternoon on a hop-on-hop-off tour of the historic district, where local actors boarded at selected stops and acted out small parts of the city's history. Our guide told us that Savannah is famous for producing strong-willed, stubborn women; I guess I brought sand to the beach since I came here with one of my own.

The other thing the guide warned us about was that Savannah was a big party city. It didn't disappoint as we headed down to River Street in the evening for a nice final dinner to end the holiday and found the street busy with tourists and locals alike. After a bottle of wine our waiter wouldn't let us go without joining him in a few complimentary rounds of ouzo and lemoncello. We stumbled out of our restaurant already a bit light on our feet only to find that Savannah Oktoberfest was in full swing on River Street. A local band belted out 90's cover tunes (yeah, Gen-X!) while local microbrews were served up on the public street. (Damn, is it ever a nice change to be treated like an adult when it comes to booze in public; large crowds of people carried their beer around out in the open AND THE WORLD DIDN'T END!?!)*

Close to midnight we started to make our way back to our bed and breakfast but it was so pleasantly warm and several pubs had sidewalk tables out. We couldn't resist stopping for a nightcap while eavesdropping on the numerous "Haunted Savannah" walking tours that made their way around the streets. And when the waitress spotted us looking tired she offered us "to go" cups to finish our beers on the way home. (That's right, we walked the public streets with beers in our hands after mignight AND THE SUN DIDN'T EXPLODE!?!)*

So we had a grand ol' time in Savannah.

And we had a grand ol' hangover in the morning.

(* In hindsight, my non-Canadian friends might not understand my ranting over the issue of open alcohol. All I can recommend is the next time you visit Canada, try doing anything you normally do back home with a drink other than drinking it quietly inside the bar or your home, and you'll understand...)

(Events of Oct 28, 2016.)

Jekyll Island

Making our way up the Georgia coast, we detoured for a few hours to explore Jekyll Island. Developed as a vacation resort for the east coast elites (Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, Goodyears, etc.) in the early 20th century, it's estimated that when the owners were "all in" at the same time that 6% of the world's worth was controlled from this island. They're all gone now, as was everybody else while we were there; I don't know when high season is but it sure as hell ain't now because this place was deserted.

We spent a few lazy hours cruising the island, looking at "cottage" ruins (few people would define these mansions as a cottages) and various beaches, the highlight of which was Driftwood Beach, considered one of the most romantic beaches in the U.S.

This is "romantic" in the same way flowers are romantic... for some reason watching vegetation slowly die makes people think of love.

(Events of Oct 27, 2016.)

Pensacola

After a busy few days it was nice to have a chance to have a sleep in; too bad we both ended up waking up before dawn. Luckily we were rewarded for the early rise with a beautiful view of the sunrise from our balcony in Pensacola Beach, on a lovely calm morning with a pod of dolphins slowly working their way down the shore.

For the morning we were off to the famous Pensacola military base to visit the aviation museum. The Naval officer who checked our IDs when we drove onto the base said ours were the first Canadian IDs he'd ever seen, so apparently this is an attraction that mainly appeals to Americans. Since the guide book said "Visiting the base/museum is 'free' because your taxes have already paid for it." If we're the only non-Americans to visit, I read that as "Everybody else had to pay to get in here but you!"

We spent an hour in the (mostly deserted) museum, looking at various aircraft and making ourselves sick by flipping upside-down repeatedly on the 3D jet fighter flight simulator.

Leaving the museum we found out why it was empty outside: everyone had just shuffled in to see the Blue Angels do a practice show. (We saw the massive line up on the way in but since it was nearly 30C with no shade, we figured we'd see if we could get in later since we've seen the Blue Angels before.) Luckily we got there just in time for the show to start.

For the afternoon we went back to enjoy our beach resort, but this stretch of the Gulf coast is more geared toward that younger, party crowd, and we preferred the quieter resort towns from a few days ago.

Florida Caverns State Park

The only task today was to drive up the coast to Pensacola, but with only four hours of drive time to cover but six hours between hotel check-outs and check-ins, plus gaining an hour back as we cross a time zone, we had some time to kill.

First we visited St George's Island by car, allowing me to recount the ultra-marathon run for Jessica but by car this time. (It seemed pathetically short from the air-conditioned car interior.) This time I was able to give in to the temptation that I had been forced to resist during my ordeal yesterday: heading down to the beach and having a wade in the Gulf.

St. George's Island has a gorgeous white-sand beach and a sleepy, laid-back atmosphere; we made a note that this would be a good place to come and relax for a few weeks.

We then headed inland to revisit what is becoming a tradition for me on the day after a marathon: spelunking. A few hours' drive found us at Florida Caverns State Park, which we had assumed to be a kitschy, stand-behind-the-handrails, view-from-afar type thing but turned out to be quite immersive and impressive.

No jokes today.

(Events of October 24, 2016.)

Running for the Bay, in Pictures

Today was the main event for this trip: the Apalachicola "Running for the Bay" 50 km Ultra-Marathon.

This was a psychologically interesting "out and back" course: it crossed two very long sea bridges then down a coastal island, all at right angles to each other, so from the start line you could effectively see the turn-around point from the start line, some 25 km away on the horizon.

We set off before dawn into a cool ocean breeze towards the rising sun.

About 45 minutes into the race, still on bridge #1, the sun finally came up over bridge #2, where I'd be in an hour (and again in four hours).

I spotted this billboard at Eastpoint, the stretch of mainland where the two bridges connect. Twelve years ago when I first attempted marathon running, I used the Jeff Galloway training program. Was this a sign?!? (Metaphorically, in addition to physically, that is.)

(Post race Googling revealed there is no relation.)

Bridge #2 was long and lonely.

Really long...

Seriously, will this bridge ever end?

Finally onto St. George's Island, the course finally changed from "nothing but concrete and water" into vacation summer homes and rentals, though I wasn't able to take a ton of pictures because the heat was making my hands quite sweaty so operating my iPhone was difficult.

2.5 hours ago I saw the 5K runners turn back; 2 hours ago I saw the 10K runners turn back; 1.5 hours ago the half-marathons turned back, now it was time to say goodbye to the marathoners.

(Read: "Wimps made out of marshmallows, turn left; heroes chiseled out of steel, turn right.)

I finally reached the (very anticlimactic) 50K turn-around point at just over three hours, just ahead of my target pace of 6.5 hours for the whole course. (This is quite slow for most of my friends who run, but relatively fast for me. I chose this time because it is the course limit for the Calgary 50 km if I ever chose to run it.)

Getting back down St. George's Island is where I started to feel the first hints of fatigue, largely physiologically-inspired since it was quite hot, humid, and there were only a handful of us left back here. (FWIW I wasn't last, but there were only about a half-dozen people behind me.) By the time I got back onto bridge #2 I was all by myself, with no other runners within sight in front of me or behind me.

This was where I suffered my most lingering injury from the race, in the form of sunburn. I had basically bathed in 50 SPF waterproof sunscreen before starting the race, but that was 5+ hours of sweaty running ago and I knew it wouldn't last the race, so had mostly tried to cover up with clothing. However, running away from the sun on this white, reflective asphalt, my calves got absolutely fried and were beet red and stinging for days after the race. (Also, after sweating so much in the briney sea air, drips of sweat dried into crusts of salt on my brows and left me with sunburned outlines of drips on my face.)

As I got back to the mainland and with a few km before attempting the return over bridge #1, I had just passed about 40 km and was at about five hours, meaning I had a full hour and a half to complete the final ten kilometers and was feeling pretty good about it. However, now on land I realized the sea breeze had been keeping me cool and now in the noonday sun, running on blacktop with no shade at all, the temperature jumped by 10C or so. Then my old nemesis came a knockin': HUNGER. This had been my undoing back in Warsaw last month, and now it was past 12:30 I was running into trouble again. (My running friends don't know this pain since they generally finish early enough to have a late brunch.) "Enough with this running bullsh*t", said my brain, "Let's go into one of these beach bars and get some nachos!" (I still had a lot of Cliff bars and Sharkeys in my camel back, but I simply couldn't stomach eating any more of them.) As another bad omen: the batteries on my Apple Watch and my Bluetooth earbuds both died. (I had chargers for both but it seemed like I would be finished before they had time to recharge.)

Within minutes the wheels fell off and I could barely bring myself to walk. I hit "the wall" as suddenly and as hard as I ever had. (I had been texting Jessica updates through the race, and afterwards she noted there was only 11 minutes between "Just got by 40K; 6.5 hours will be close" and "Just ran out of gas; need to walk now.") I managed to run 50% of the time until I got to the full-marathon distance of 42.2 km just as I started back on bridge #1, but then had to give up and start power-walking 90% of the time, running for maybe 50 meters at a time.

This was a looong, unpleasant walk back across the bridge: no other runners within sight, the hot midday sun beating down on me, and sucking in exhaust from the heavy two-way traffic ripping by meters away. Plus, despite having a backpack full of running food, I was STARVING and kept texting Jessica to bring food to the end line. The small hill at the end of the bridge might look like a gentle incline, but to me it was the final ascent to the summit of Everest (and I climbed it slower than people on the mountain make that final push).

Finally back in Apalachicola, I mustered the strength to break into a slow jog for the last kilometer and finally turned the corner to see what I had been dreaming of for the last seven hours, though there were few left to cheer me to the finish at this late hour.

(Sadly, with my watch no longer working I hadn't realized I was so close to at least staying under seven hours, else I might have tried for a little more of a running push at the end.)

So sadly my definition of a "50 Km Ultra Marathon" was really "a regular marathon plus a 8 km power-walk". I'm disappointed but not devastated, because I knew my training this summer had been lackluster and that the Florida heat was going to be a problem, and I'm glad I was able to stumble to the finish line under my own strength at all. Now it's behind me there's only one thing left to say:

Thank fuck that's over!

(Events of October 23, 2016.)

Lunch in Alabama

(Looks like I forgot to post a closing blog entry from our time in Poland last month, and this barely counts as an opening post for our time in the American Bible Belt, but here goes...)

A long day of flying yesterday got us to Atlanta, and today we had a long day of driving to make our way down to Apalachicola on the Florida panhandle. To tick the box on another American state we took a small side trip across the Chattahoochee River from Georgia into Alabama, but only to have a quick lunch in the skeeviest gas-station-housed Subways in the world.

Both Alabama and Georgia failed to live up to our biases by showing a surprising lack of "Make America Great Again" lawn signs for the Tangerine Menace, and we even saw a single "I'm With Her" sign for Clinton (though in hindsight that might have been in Florida).

Tomorrow I'm running the "Running for the Bay" 50 km Ultra-Marathon, a very small race of only a few hundred people. Since my disastrous marathon in Warsaw last month my training has completely fallen apart (caught a cold for a week, then Calgary's weather got really cold, then work got really busy), plus it's forecast to be 25C and humid tomorrow, and I've never run this long a distance before. Fortunately the race has a generous eight-hour time limit, so what could possibly go wrong?

(Events of Oct 22, 2016.)

Krakow

For the evening of the 27th we had a few hours walking tour around Krakow, which was not destroyed by the Nazis in the war and is therefore better preserved and more historical. However, we were getting pretty tired after getting up at 4AM to catch the train here in the morning and four hours touring Auschwitz. So we told our guide we just wanted a brief, "photo op" walking tour through Krakow and then to drop us off at the train station an hour early so we could get some food and rest.

For the train back to Warsaw we met back up with another group that had been with us on and off throughout the day (because they were using the same tour company), a couple of Swedish men who asked us if hockey was big in Canada. We responded that hockey was HUGE in Canada and that you have to turn over your passport if you don't worship hockey. This was somewhat discredited over the next ten minutes when it was revealed that the Swedes were aware of the following facts whereas we were completely unaware of them:

• That the World Cup of Hockey tournament was taking place.
• That the finals of the World Cup of Hockey had not yet taken place.
• That the finals of the World Cup of Hockey was a best of three, not a single game.
• That Canada had already qualified for the finals of the World Cup of Hockey.
• That Sweden had been eliminated from the World Cup of Hockey in the semi-finals only hours before.
• The structure of Team Europe and Team North America in the World Cup of Hockey, or that they even had these teams.

Other things we couldn't come up with:

• A single Swedish player on the Calgary Flames, either current or historical.
• A single Swedish player in the entire league, either current or historical.
• A single player on the Calgary Flames current roster, of any nationality.

However, I was able to point out that twelve years ago when the Flames had their 2004 Stanley Cup run, we had a lot of Finnish players (though I couldn't name any), and Finland is close to Sweden, so I'm sure my deep hockey expertise was fully restored in their minds.

(Events of Sept 27, 2016; evening.)