Florida Sandcastles

Our family spends a lot of time on the beach when we go to Indian Rocks, Florida. We keep busy building creations in the sand. Everything from plain piles of sand to snapping turtles to standard castles.

Some of us are the designers and the diggers, some the sculptors and others the supervisors, critics and admirers.

These are our creations for Florida 2008.

We imagined.
Then we enjoyed building and playing with the sand.

We also made sure to run around laughing as the sea reclaimed the sand we had borrowed.

Racing in Florida: Richard's Run for Life 5km

We are on vacation near Tampa, Florida and independently both of us thought it would be fun to do a race while we were here.

We lucked out in with a 5km race tonight in Ybor City, a historic neighborhood northeast of downtown Tampa. The race is called Richard's Run for Life and is a cancer fundraiser.
We almost missed the race with the traffic/rush hour of Tampa. Parked and did our "warm-up" run to pick up our numbers with 15 minutes to spare for the 7 pm start.

In 2006 this race had 660 runners. 2007 there was 673. This year there was around 1200! But they handled it really well.
The course is not really scenic: several out and backs on city streets starting and finishing at the historic Cuban Club built in 1917.

The race was really well organized with lots of volunteers for packet picket and for the post race party. The post race food was really tasty tacos and paella with free wine, beer and soda.

Trisha nailed her fastest time in a couple of years with 25:15 (8:07).
I ran 18:38 (5:59), 15th overall and my fastest time this year. I grabbed a 1st place paella plate in one of the old man age groups.

It took a long time to get to the awards ceremony. The reason: 1200 people and they were doing the results BY HAND!. It was like a time warp back to the '70s. I have no idea how this race managed to get these results organized. As you crossed the finish line you were passed a card with your overall finish position. It was then up to you to enter your name, address and finish time on the card.
These cards were then placed into little plastic troughs for each age group in random order. Then one guy sorted these cards and stapled the top three from each age group on a larger result card. Trisha and I stood and watched to really see how this worked. Even more amazing the race organizers announced that the full results will be up online by Sunday night! Someone actually has to type in all these results...youch!! The old school way did work, but man, someone get these guys some computerized results! :-)
Full 2008 results can be found at Cool Running.

Fun race, great food (and lots of it) and organization with cool and unique age group awards. Hopefully we can do it again.

Mt Hood Snow Day

Cole and Leah have been begging to hit some snow over the Christmas break so today we headed for the hills and made it above the snow line.

We checked out the Mt Hood Ski bowl to do some tubing but we were underwhelmed. The hill was small, busy and not really cheap ($13 for 2 hours per person). Compared to the tubing we did last year at Mt Bachelor for Kai and Renata's wedding it looked rather lame and tame.

So we jumped in the car and drove to the Snow Bunny Sno Park . On weekends and some holidays there is a concession here and it costs $10 to use as part of the Summit Ski Area. But today it was free and perfect for our little snow hounds.

We made a snow fort and slid down some hills and generally enjoyed a nice short peek at winter.
Ended with a nice trip to "south of the border"...Taco Bell :-)

Zoo Lights

With Grandma Isaak visiting we headed out to the Portland Zoo lights display.

The lights were cool but so was the weather...at least for Portland. We spent a good portion of the time huddling into some of the animal houses to warm up cold toes and fingers. No rain and with Portland under a snow advisory for tomorrow with a possible 7 inches this may be our last trip out for a day or two :-)

Leah's favorite lights were the butterflies while Cole liked the alligators.

Bonus was that our zoo membership got us in for free!

Florida 2007

We have had the privilege of vacationing at Indian Shores, Florida for a week in October / November for the past several years. All started after an OOPSLA trip in 2001. Man, was nice again this year! We were glad Grandpa was able to join us.

We traveled down on Southwest (CHEAP!) and arrived late Friday. We stayed again with Kat at Sand Glo.

Saturday...slow morning after not much sleep. The kids were not tired enough from the plane ride on Friday.
Hit Costco to stock up on groceries. Rest of the day out on the beach. Hot and muggy but cloudy which was quite a nice change from Portland :-)

Leah was sick overnight...to many helpings of cake? So Sunday morning was nice and slow getting out to the beach by 10am.
We then hit our perennial favorite: the Seacoast seabird sanctuary. Leah kept asking to go to the bird cemetery. Cute in a morbid kinda way :-)

Walking back the kids pretty much swam back the whole half mile. Bait fish everywhere. Leah was hit in the head twice by the jumping fish. Cole got tagged in the back. Fun all around.

Monday was really hot and muggy so we went indoors to the Florida Aquarium in Tampa.
Kids liked playing in the water features out in the back after touring all the tanks and exhibits.
I loved the huge Great Tank...23 ft by 3 ft about 1500 gallons fresh water. Cool.

Tuesday was another hot and muggy beach day.
Lots of time out in the surf and beach combing. We had to work hard not to get sunburnt...near record temperatures (90) for this time of year out on the coast.

Wednesday we had planned to do the tourist thing and hit Busch Gardens. But the weather was really crappy so we hung out for a day and then went into Tampa for fun rides, food and animal exihibits on Thursday.

More storms overnight made for great beach combing on Friday. Swimming scallops, clams, hermit crabs and even a really cool little octopus. Home schooling right on the beach. The kids had no idea we were sneaking in so much biology :-)

We ended the day with our traditional mini golf game at Smuggler's Cove. How can you beat golf with a ship and live alligators?

We also tried out a new hamburger joint: Five Guys. Kindof like the In-N-Out of the east. Highly recommended.

Cannot wait for next year!