Hi From San Francisco

I’m sitting in the Royal Ground Coffee shop on Fillmore Street in San Francisco right now…I picked this place because of the large “FREE INTERNET” sign on the outside window. I’ve already drank my hot cocoa while I was reading and replying to my e-mails and now that I have a nice sugar buzz…it’s time to write a blog post:)!
This morning started at 4:15am when my alarm went off…I had a 4:30am shuttle from the OTC to the COS airport. Although it was extremely early for my 6:30am flight…I’m glad I had all the extra time in the airport. After checking in for my flight to San Francisco, I purchased my ticket to LAX for my next triathlon race in Long Beach.
I prefer buying my United plane tickets online because of the bonus 1000 miles they give you, but I had $300 of United vouchers that were about to expire. The only way to use the vouchers was at a United certified location (a.k.a…the airport). There was NO way I was going to let that money expire because I spent an extra 10 hours in the airport last year on my way home from Alcatraz!! The flight was overbooked and they offered $600 of travel money for people to give up their seats…I was on that deal like white on rice!!
Maybe this year I will get that opportunity again, keep your fingers crossed. My round trip ticket from COS to SFO for this race on Sunday was a total of $10! Thanks to the thousands of United miles that I have racked up…I used 25,000 of them and only had to pay the $10 taxes.
Back to what I’ve done today…the flight was pretty uneventful, I slept most of the way! We landed in SFO at 8am and my bags arrived without any problems. I took the BART train into the downtown area and got off at Montgomery Street. Christine’s offices are right around the corner and she met me at the exit. I got a quick tour of her offices…very cool with lots of great photos of the Special Olympians. She showed me the postcards of the 2006 Tiburon Mile…there’s a great photo of me swimming in the middle of all the guys. I took a big stack and plan on mailing them to EVERYONE that I know:) If you would like to get some snail mail from me…let me know!
I took a taxi from Christine’s offices to her apartment…met one of her roommates for the first time (she was out of town last year) and went to work on building my bike. After getting everything unpacked I spent about an hour relaxing on the couch with the TV remote control.
Finally, I motivated to get up and head out for some exercise…little did I realize, going DOWN Fillmore street on you bike is a LOT more scary than in a car!! I was off my seat, leaning back over the rear wheel to prevent if from flipping me end-over-end down the hill! Too bad there are stop signs every 200 meters or I would have LOVED to fly down the street…and I would have been FLYING, just like the cars do in the movies! But maybe we should keep that until after the race because I would be likely to kill myself!
I biked over to the Hyatt where Sam was staying…she left me a room key at the front desk so that I could use the hotel pool. It was a bit short (maybe 20 meters) but it was outside, in the sun, and completely empty…I swam for 30 minutes and actually had fun swimming in different shapes. I did the ‘figure 8’, the ‘X’, and the “M’ to make it a bit more exciting and stretch out the 20 meters by going from corner to corner.
After drying off in the sun, I headed up to Sam’s room and since she was there, hung out with her for an hour while she built her bike. We left the hotel together for a short bike ride to the race site, chatting about this-and-that, and then I said good-bye because I had to get lunch and some groceries at the Safeway. The rest of my day is pretty boring…I WALKED back up Fillmore street to the apartment, took a shower, grabbed my computer and walked to this coffee shop!
It’s been fun filling you in on my 2006 Alcatraz adventure…tonight will be dinner with Christine and her boyfriend…followed by sleep and then all the fun events of “the day before the race”:) Later, Gators:)