Thursday, June 12, 2008

Too much travel



Last week my work sent me to Virginia for some lame training. Aside from living in France for a couple years I've never traveled much at all, so getting over to that end of the country was kind of nice, but many parts of the trip realy kinda sucked.






One saving grace was that a few weeks ago Kayla and I finaly needed new cell phones bad enough that she let me buy some. I got one to satisfy the tech nerd inside:

Its a Blackjack 2, and comes with all the bells and whistles to make me clap my hands and shreek with joy!: GPS, Windows Mobile 6, full media player and even caller ID! One of the first things I did was download an NES emulator along with about 800 nintendo games. Needless to say my bathroom breaks have gotten alot longer and Kayla has hated this thing since about day two. Sadly though even in my tech nerd glory I'm still a bit of a poser, I didn't buy a data plan so I can't realy use it for email and internet surfing like it's made for, I even have to cringe a bit when I get text mesages because I have to pay for them individualy.


So, the phone did help alot to keep me pacified on the planes and bus, oh yes the BUS. My company is super cheap and my travel plans were not too well organized so since I had to return to Boise instead of Pocatello, I had the pleasure of taking a Greyhound from SLC to Boise. It took 9 painful hours to make the trip, since my MP3 player was out of order durring that week I was treated with listening to the old ladies behind me get aquainted by telling stories about their health problems (mostly tooth loss) and illegitimate grand children they had living with them.


After 17 hours of travel on Friday I woke up bright and early Saturday to do the LP200 relay bike race from Boise to Sun Valley. It's a fun race where you have a team of 4 riders who work together to cover the distance. The course is broken up into 10 sections where different riders can swap out and take turns and/or ride together. I rode the first section, a couple in between and we all rode the final leg together. In all I rode something like 90 miles and our team finished in about 8hours45min, good enough for 12th out of about 60 teams. Not too bad and I'd say mainly thanks to Justin M. kicking butt on the hilly stretches.


After the race I had to get back to Pokey so Kayla met up with me in Twin Falls where I loaded my bike in our car and we took off. Unfortunately it wasn't until we got home that I realized that when I loaded my bike I forgot my bag of bike gear on the curb in front of the gas station back in Twin. Luckly I called them up and they found my bag to set aside for me. Sunday was busy with church stuff and I was wasted all day, so I had to wait until Monday and take the day off work to go back to get the bag. I convinced Kayla and Susie to make a day of it with me so we went and checked out the falls while we were there.