The road trip to marathon #3 – Portland, Oregon

Our marathon weekend started out with a short 5 plus hour drive with the husband o’ mine. In case you missed it, my hubs was running his first marathon with me.  And probably his last one. *sad face*  The drive caused some anxiety and I tried not to take the mishaps we encountered as a sign of what was might come.  Let’s see….we almost rear-ended a car in front of us, that instead of getting into the turning lane, it didn’t.  He just stopped right in the middle of the highway in a 55 mph section.  S saw the whole thing, brake lights, turning signal…then I showed him a bag of jalapeno jerky I bought him…we looked up and the car hadn’t moved over into the empty turning lane.  It was scary how quickly it all happened and how quickly things could have changed. The next mishap wasn’t so dramatic and just involved a very large tire that a semi truck lost and was dangerously in the middle of the road.  Lastly, we had a very large rock from somewhere nail our front windshield.  We now have a pretty nice chip that is almost an inch in diameter.  All this happened within the first 2.5 hours of out trip.  Thank goodness that was the end of the driving drama.  (Well, except when our GPS took us on a mini, yet scenic, detour of Portland.)
We made it to the expo with plenty of time to spare.  S was great and really let me wander around looking at everything.  It’s the only race expo I’ve been too x3 and I don’t think you could call it big…but I thought it was just the right size.  It seemed to me that there were more goodies there than last year?  Or maybe I was just a little more bold in snagging the free samples.

The participant shirt, my new free Nuun water bottle the nice guy gave me when I purchased a new to me flavor of Nuun.  The verdict on the grape Nuun is that I love it but I’m slightly weirded out that it’s not purple in color.  I’ll take no artificial colorings though over purple any day…it was just odd at first.  Some of the samples were from the hubs that he gifted to me as he’s not a huge fan of anything with the word “healthy” on it.  You also don’t see a few packets of fruit snacks that I had already eaten along with the samples that you had to consume there.  I’ll tell you more later about these fabulous snack bars we had there though.  OMG!

I had a celebrity sighting in the form of a blogger…and by celebrity, I mean…another normal person with a blog and I just happened to recognize her.  I didn’t say hi because I thought that would make me a weird stalker.  I told my husband and he said I was stupid and then tried to help me find her to say hi.  No luck.  I ended up stalking her on twitter instead.  We connected and all is restored in the land of crazy running bloggers.
After the expo, we went and found our cheapy hotel room.  I didn’t care it wasn’t so fabulous.  It was cheap, only a 15 minute drive from the start AND they were super nice and let us extend our late checkout to 2pm with no charge.  Hellooooo post race shower and ice bath for FREE!  Our dinner plans were changed rather last minute due to a certain college student not wanting to hang out with old people.  When will they learn to take advantage of free food?!  Fine then!  We ended up going to a better place than we would have gone…Claim Jumpers.  The main reason being that it was close to the hotel and something about some sports casters that the hubs always listen to…they eat there…blah blah blah.  I don’t remember names or any other part of the story.  That’s what a slice of cake that is bigger than your head will do to your memory.

Guess how much that slice of cake cost?

I was very pleased with my dinner choice too.  Some sort of parmesan crusted chicken breast and the obligatory spaghetti with marinara sauce.  It was delicious yet I managed to put half aside for after the marathon.  (Turned out that I took a couple of bites and then tossed it.  No appetite until later in the evening.)

I’ve told you before, my photography skills are something to be admired.

Back to the hotel for an early 4am wake up call for me.  I’m pretty sure I was asleep by 9pm.  Not too shabby!
To be continued….