Kentucky.

Vacation time is over, and in less than 24 hours, Ironman Louisville starts.

Thursday night/Friday early morning, Dad and I left Virginia Beach after a lovely relaxing few days of beach time, bike rides, off road trails, water slides, and some well spent time with my family, especially my sister, who I barely see at home since she's always out. (Pictures to come but I don't have my upload cord here in Indiana.)

Oh yeah- Dad and I are staying at a Motel 6 across the Ohio River from Kentucky in Indiana. It's awesome. The non-smoking room we're in has an ASHTRAY with a NO SMOKING sign on it. That'll show those smoking bastards! There's an outdoor pool, set right on the highway. Also awesome.


Anyway, Dad and I left VA at 2 a.m. to get to Louisville in time for check in. He drove the first 2 hours but then I took over from 4-10. We stopped for breakfast, made a few pit stops, and arrived without major issues to Kentucky at 2:30. I managed to check in with only minor problems- myUSAT card is expired, they never sent me a new one when I renewed my license, so normally I just bring the old card to races and they look it up on the computer. I didn't have a printer in VA so I figured I would be fine. Turns out, for some reason Ironman didn't have anyone with Internet access, so I had to run to the conference center lobby and use their copy shop to go online and print my license. What a waste of 6 bucks. It's just annoying because a) I should have thought ahead for it, but USAT website only prints out licenses good for 24 hours anyway, and b) it's not my fault they never sent the new license. But, whatever. Everyone was really nice as I signed in, and super helpful.

We checked in to our motel, realized the room was super tiny, so we went out to see the sights after I did a 15 minute run and played around in the highway pool for a while.

It's a Cinderella Carriage! (I'm not a huge fan of horses, but this was awesome.)

I LOVE THIS BIKE RACK! There were artsy bike racks everywhere. Very cool.
Tugboats! I tried to get a picture of me with them, but Dad is not so good with my camera.

He did manage to take this picture though.

While that was all well and good, this sign about sewage in the water made me a little nervous:
(Luckily, there hadn't been much rain recently.)

Anyway, by the time we finished that, it was time for the pre-race meeting. I didn't feel like I learned a whole lot, but it didn't help that I could barely hear anything. Afterward, I really wanted Panera for dinner but they closed at 7PM (!?!?!) So, we ended up getting burritos and going back to the Motel to sleep. Shockingly, I wasn't completely exhausted, even though I'd driven 12 hours and slept for about 3 the night before.

Next morning, up bright and early to get stuff done for transition. But first, a walk to the swim start to get an idea of how it would go:

A swim around the island? Looks nice from here! It's a little tougher when you're in it with 2000+ people.

And we ate lunch at a really nice bar with excellent beer (though I could only try it, not drink a lot of it.) Good pizza for KY, but it's no NY pizza!

Finally, on to transition. It was neat how they had volunteers escorting each person, explaining everything and showing us where everything was. It definitely made me way less nervous.

And there's my bike!

Then, Dad and I bummed around the town, took our mountain bikes for a short ride along the river, went to Big Lots and got mom a pizza stone, went to the grocery store, went in the pool, and basically killed time until I was beat enough to get to sleep, ready to get racing...