The last 45 days or so....

I feel like such a bad blogger....I didn't realize until today that I blogged almost 45 days ago.

In late November, we went on a trip to Seattle, Tofino and Vancouver BC. I need to look at the photos and I'll upload some by the end of the year. It was a great vacation and much needed...we had great weather and I got to visit Pike Place Market!

We started our trip in Seattle - a couple of days of sightseeing and eating and then we drove to Canada . A ferry took us from mainland Canada to Vancouver Island. We drove for about three hours to reach our destination: Tofino. We stayed at Wickinnish Inn, our room was right by the beach and we got to listen to the waves crashing in at night. The days were shorter - sunrise around 8-9am and sunset 4:30-5 - so we were not able to do as much hiking as we wanted too. We did lots of hiking at the Pacific Rim National Park. Big trees...lots of hills and valleys; NO wildlife (a good thing as they had been Bear & Cougar attacks!); water. Again, lots of sightseeing and eating! We got back on the road and we took another ferry that took us to Vancouver.

Vancouver is preparing for the 2010 Winter Olympics and as you can imagine the city was busy with construction so lots of traffic. We stayed at a B&B, O' Canada House, great house and better food. We had two amazing breakfasts. We really enjoy staying at B&Bs as they're cozy and small. Lots of sightseeing & eating. It was raining a lot, so we decided to go to a museum - Vancouver Art Museum. Their current exhibition is Wack! Art and the Feminist Revolution. I like art and Jon has started to enjoy visiting art museums in our travels....but this exhibit was wacky and it just didn't have much appeal. We did find a couple of works that were interesting but overall it did not warrant a second look. Yes, more eating - lots of it. I usually gain like 4+ pounds whenever we go on vacation, no matter how much exercise I do during vacation. I need to do another post...just on food.

Our plan was to spend our last night in Canada and wake up on 11/29 Saturday morning and drive back to Seattle. Our flight was schedule to leave at 12:30pm Sat. Bad choice. Lots of lessons learned. First, never stay in another country and have a flight schedule out of another one. We got stuck at the border - we had scheduled to wait a max of one hour - and we waited for almost 2 1/2 hours. Jon was beyond frustrated. It was a bit before 10 am when we left the border and we still had a 2 hour to Seattle. Drop the rental and get to the airport. Well, we went. No choice but to drive and see if we could make it. We got to the airport at 12:15pm. Enough time? We thought so b/c our flight was delayed but the bags had to be checked-in 30 min prior. We had thirty minutes....but the airline counts 30 mins from the Original scheduled...not the delayed time. Second lesson....if you're going to miss a flight avoid traveling on the weekend after a major holiday. We got on stand-by for the 3 pm flight. No go. Next stand-by for 11:40 pm flight. No go. Got to spend the night at the Seattle airport. Third lesson, pack a couple of toiletries with you (toothpaste, toothbrush, etc). Jon and I went over 30+ hours w/o brusing our teeth, deodorant, etc. Icky. Fourth lesson, if you go on stand-by (at least for Continental) - you had to get back in-line to get on the next flight for your stand-by ticket. Crazy. So, make sure that you're first in line for stand-by as sometimes only one or two people get to board the flight. We left Seattle at 6 am Sunday morning to Houston. We got to Houston and I'll spare the drama..but Jon went first as he had to work Sunday evening and I boarded the last flight out of Houston to Jackson. I got to Jackson around 10 pm on Sunday and went to bed as I was scheduled to work on Monday.

The post has gotten long....but I've stuck to my training for the half-marathon run on January 3rd! MS Blues. Last week, our group did 11.2 miles (my longest distance run to date) and I know that I'm getting old...but my body can't take much more of this....I had problems so far with the bursa socket, tendinitis, and hip flexors. I've started to take tylenol before our Saturday runs. I hope to be able to finish Sat without too much pain. I've convinced Jon to join..so he is also running! So excited to know that someone will be at the finish line to carry me out.

I'll post photos soon. Hope everyone had a good Merry Christmas holiday.