Monday, June 20, 2011

Catching Up

Due to not having internet access, this post is a summary of Saturday, Sunday and Monday.

On Saturday we drove from to Lethbridge, AB. Hollie and I are members of the Hattiesburg Family Y and this gives us access to any Y in the world. That came in handy on Saturday because it had rained off and on all day and we needed to be inside for our workout. We also planned to "boondock" in the Walmart parking lot and we wanted to be able to shower after our workout. The Y was very nice with state of the art treadmills which I really found to be cushioned to my liking which meant that I ran 5.5 miles and walked 1 mile. After we showered, we headed to the Walmart where we parked (along with 7 other RVs) for the night.

On Sunday we drove from Lethbridge to the West side of Edmonton. Along the way, we made a stop at a shopping center in Calgary. We were surprised when we saw thousands of people walking around with hockey sticks. We quickly learned that the center was hosting a four on four hockey tournament. They had set up small rinks (no ice/no skates) all over the entire mall parking area. As you can imagine, hockey is a big deal up here.

After we left Calgary, heading to Edmonton, the rain started and once again we were faced with how to get in our workouts without getting soaked. You must know that the temperatures were in the 50-60 F range and we did not want to run/bike in the rain in those temps. We stopped at the visitor's center in Red Deer, AB and learned that there was a public fitness center that we could use. It was the Collicutt Centre and it was amazing. I think it is a city facility and it was 250,000 square feet of aquatic fun, badminton, basketball, gymnastics, dance, ice hockey, floor hockey, volleyball, coffee shop/snack bar, library/reading room, indoor track, TV rooms, dressing rooms, and more. If I lived there I'd probably just spend most of my day there. As it was, I ran about 4 miles on the indoor track which was about 300 meters in length. It was not the traditional oval, but had a long straight of about 130 meters and the rest of it was an odd wavy shape. After showering, we once again hit the road for Edmonton where we boodocked at a Walmart. It rained all night and did not let up until about 9:00 am this morning. We waited until there was break in the rain and then we pulled out with the plan to make it to Grand Prairie, AB. We had only driven about 20 minutes when we were once again in rain. After a couple of hours we finally got out of that.

When we arrived in Grand Prairie, we decided that we wanted to stay at full service RV park. After we got set up, we drove to the visitor center where we learned about the beautiful trail system where Hollie rode his cat trike for 23 miles and I ran 3.5 miles and walked 1.25. We then drove back to the Happy Trails RV park where we are set for the evening.

I'm not sure where we will be tomorrow night. I just hope we are done with the rain for awhile.

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