Another PTR - Let's Make it a Half!

SO, a couple of comments. We just spent a weekend in Toronto, and I printed out directions to the various locations we were heading to. One thing I noticed with Google Maps is they tried to get us to travel on the 407 highwayexpress toll road through Toronto. This is a toll road, which in itself isn't bad, but it is a "no ticket" toll road. In other words, you have to have your car equipped with a sensor, or if you don't they photograph your license plate and send you a bill. In your case, they likely would send it to your rental car company, who would then retroactively charge you. My advice is, avoid this road even if your map/GPS tells you to take it. The charge is 30 cents / KM, so the fees can really add up.

Second, you will be fine with that location in Niagara Falls. You may not get a view of the falls, as there are hotels that are between you and the falls, but the location is very central. I personally think a falls-view room is a tad overrated, it's awesome for about 30 seconds, and then you realize that you aren't going to spend a lot of time standing by the window looking out at the falls.

There's lots to do in the falls, but of course definitely do the the boat ride (Used to be the Maid of the Mist, but Canada got an alternative one call Hornblower cruises.) The "Behind the falls" tour is pretty cool too! The WEGO shuttle/bus system is convenient if you want transportation without having to move your car all around, it's only $7 per person per day. There's lots of cheesy tourist stuff to do along Lundy's Lane / Stanley Ave, I wouldn't recommend any of it, but it can be a fun evening walking up and down the strip and trying something that interests you. Obviously there is plenty of other stuff to do, you can find out about it on the internet. If you have any specific questions, feel free to send me a message.

Thanks so much for your comments! They are all super helpful! We'll probably instruct our GPS to avoid toll roads for our road trip, but I'll definitely make sure it doesn't take us on the 407. The toll roads over here are all like that - no booths, just sensor/photograph. I've often wondered how tourists go with that. Great to hear your comments about our accommodation too - I think in the end a good location will be more important than a pretty view. Will definitely make sure we do the cruise and the Behind the Falls attraction.

We've actually discovered that there's a free music festival in Hamilton that weekend, which features one of our favourite singers as the headliner on Sunday night! Originally we were planning to get to Niagara Falls at about lunch time, and start our sight-seeing there, but we're going to have to divert via Hamilton to catch Sharon Jones. Apparently they're expecting her to start at around 5pm and do about an hour set, so it still won't be a late night, just a little later than we were originally anticipating. We'll have to try to figure out more detailed logistics (like directions, parking etc) a bit closer to the time, as there's so little information around at the moment. I actually had to message the festival committee on facebook to get an idea of when Sharon Jones would actually be on.
 
Boo to American Airlines!

This morning when I got up (at 5am), I found DH already on Skype with AA. It had already been half an hour. About 40 minutes later, he got off the phone, not having achieved all that much.

Our original booking was for the Buffalo-Boston flight leaving at 9:30ish and getting into Boston at 11ish, in time for our next flight to Tokyo leaving at 1:30ish. This was the only leg of our flight where we had to fly economy because the first class cabin was full, which was going to be fine for such a short flight. However, AA have decided to cancel that flight. That was the first direct flight of the day, and the next one won't get us there in time. So we're having to leave Buffalo at 6:30am, which means we'll have to leave our hotel at about 4am. First strike. We also have to fly via Washington DC, which will mean 3-4 times the total flying time of the original flight, plus the short, rushed layover in Washington. Second strike. Next, because our original flight was booked in economy class (even though we have redeemed the full amount of points for an international business class flight, which includes first class on all domestic routes), they are trying to make us pay an upgrade fee to put us in first for these new flights! Not happy AA! :furious:
 
We haven't had any further luck with AA yet.

However, yesterday I did receive my package from Asos, and everything is great!
 


Not much you can do about #1 and #2, but I would be bitc*ing up a storm about #3. Call customer service and then ask for an account manager. Usually if you get high enough in the organization, they should respond to you. This is THEIR doing, NOT yours, they should at least acknowledge the points you used.
 
So sorry that you're getting the AA runaround. :(

Dodgy on AA's behalf!

Not much you can do about #1 and #2, but I would be bitc*ing up a storm about #3. Call customer service and then ask for an account manager. Usually if you get high enough in the organization, they should respond to you. This is THEIR doing, NOT yours, they should at least acknowledge the points you used.

I'm not sure where DH is at with this, but since it's difficult for us to catch management with the time difference, I'm thinking of going to social media.
 


Ok, so I've been kind of slack on the trip planning front recently. All I've done is spend all my money on Disneybounding items lol! Boo is ready.



I'm currently working on my red running dress for the 5k - just needs finishing off (hemming etc). It has taken me ages because I decided to just make the whole dress from scratch, it's my first major sewing project, the first time I've used my sewing machine, and I didn't have a pattern. It seems to fit ok and look decent, but it's pretty low quality workmanship lol! Will post a picture when I'm done.

I've been busily purchasing other items for my Disneybounding too. I've pretty much got everything I need now, just a matter of putting it all together.

I have not booked anything else for the trip yet. Can't quite believe that I still haven't got our park tickets! And I think I've decided to ditch PP+ this time around. We probably won't be doing any character meals. While the ride photos are fun, I don't think I'll miss them. And we can still get the PP photographers to take photos using my camera. If we end up with lots of awesome PP photos, and I just can't stand the thought of not having them, I can always buy the regular PP disk afterwards.

This year I won't bother buying the Marathon Foto voucher at the expo to get the discount. I'll just see what the photos are like and decide what to get from there. I'm kind of expecting that I will get the half marathon package, but there will have to be a good selection of great photos there for me to bother with the purchasing process if last year's effort was anything to go by.

My training is going really well. I've just finished my halfway point 'easy' week, and from here I'll continue to build up. My longest run so far has been 1:40, and I felt pretty good at the end of it. In fact, I was able to sprint about the last minute of it, then my friend and I went for a 7km walk that afternoon. I just need to keep going for another hour after that and that will nearly be the whole half marathon, so over halfway there if you look at it that way ;) With all the additional distance, my shorter runs have been getting faster, and I've finally managed to crack the 35 minute 5k. I have also lost just over 4kg over the course of my training program, with another 4kg to go until I reach my goal weight (she says scoffing down a cookie lol!).
 
YAY for losing weight.
YAY YAY for great training and times.

YAY YAY YAY for an amazing outfit. Boo looks fantastic. Can't wait to see the red dress.
 
Clever girl sewing a dress first up, no pattern - way beyond my ability-although I do recall a little number made for a (country) dance in grade 10 consisting of little hearts sewn together (or some other odd thing-no pics unfortunately!). Also way to go on the running and weight loss - I imagined you'd be keeping your weight constant with muscle weight replacing cookie weight! It's getting close!!!!
 
YAY for losing weight.
YAY YAY for great training and times.

YAY YAY YAY for an amazing outfit. Boo looks fantastic. Can't wait to see the red dress.

YAY YAY YAY all round!

Clever girl sewing a dress first up, no pattern - way beyond my ability-although I do recall a little number made for a (country) dance in grade 10 consisting of little hearts sewn together (or some other odd thing-no pics unfortunately!). Also way to go on the running and weight loss - I imagined you'd be keeping your weight constant with muscle weight replacing cookie weight! It's getting close!!!!

Too bad you don't have any pics of that dance costume - sounds interesting. FWIW I would have bet anything that sewing a whole dress was way beyond my ability too lol!

Unfortunately I had a bit of a bad week with diet this week and paid for it at my weigh in this morning. I gained back 400g. Back on the bandwagon this week.
 
Ok here it is...



Also during the week I made up some purple wristlets to go with it, out of a purple lycra crop top I had that had seen better days. Last week I bought a red running headband which I may or may not decide to wear on the day, and I've ordered some red hair chalk and red shoelaces from ebay. I'll put the red laces on my old running shoes which are mainly grey. Will do a picture of the whole outfit when I've received everything.

I've also made some progress on my half marathon outfit. My parents have given me an early birthday present - money to be used for compression garments. So I bought a pair of black compression shorts (my $5 K-Mart shorts just don't cut it for distances above about 5k), a pair of performance compression socks, and a pair of recovery compression socks. I'll wear the recovery ones for the flight and probably at night, and decide at the time whether I want to wear them during the day between runs/after the half. I just got plain black ones, so they'll go with both Mulan outfits if I do decide to wear them. Now I just need to get sewing!

I still haven't done any further bookings for our trip. My parents just reimbursed us for their part of the Disneyland accommodation, so we'll probably use that to buy our tickets. I've just been approved for a new credit card which comes with 110,000 bonus Velocity points if I spend $1000 on it within the first 3 months, so I'll probably wait until the card arrives and use that to buy/book anything else.

I did a 1:47 run this morning - worked out to about 13.3km. It was actually a bit of a struggle this morning, but that may be partly due to my bad eating last night too. Still, managed to get through it all (even the little hill on the way home that nearly killed me lol!). Had a nice bath this afternoon with Radox Muscle Soak. Two more weeks of getting up at 5am - the countdown is on! (We're going to Cairns in 2 weeks, where I will still have to do a daily workout, but not at 5am).
 
Very sexy outfit!! Looking good.I read about that or a similar anyway Velocity deal and thought long about how amazing it was but work was too busy to get my head round it properly - should have done what you did as its worth it! Your sticking with your training is very impressive. You will find this run so much easier I expect than the last one.
 
Va va Voom! You look fantastic!

Love it.

Thanks!

Very sexy outfit!! Looking good.I read about that or a similar anyway Velocity deal and thought long about how amazing it was but work was too busy to get my head round it properly - should have done what you did as its worth it! Your sticking with your training is very impressive. You will find this run so much easier I expect than the last one.

There's still time Wendy - do it! You can apply up until the end of September.

I don't think I'll find this run easier... it is over twice the distance of last year's lol! But yes I'm definitely better prepared this year.
 
I did mean to do an update over the weekend, but before I knew it, the weekend was gone!

I still haven't finished any of my other Disneybounding costumes. They are all pretty much complete, just waiting on one or two little finishing touches. However, I haven't even made a *start* on my half marathon outfit yet :eek:

On the travel side of things, I did finally buy our Disneyland tickets, and booked our horse riding. I ended up going with the 10am session for the horse riding. It will be definitely getting hot by the end of that 2 hour ride, but we'll need to allow about 1 1/2 hours to get there, so the 9am session seemed to early! The Disney tickets we got through Get Travel, which gave us a saving of around USD $80 per person (specially priced tickets for the run weekend, have to be used between the weekend prior to the run and the weekend after). We'll need to pick them up at the expo, which we can do on Thursday morning (international shipping was USD $35, and we weren't planning to use them before Thursday anyway).

And finally on the training side of things, on the weekend I did a 1:54 run, which took me about 14.7km. I've lost 4.8kg since I started my training, and I haven't felt this good for years! We're heading to Cairns this weekend, where I will do my 16km long run. The heat up there will give me a better idea of what to expect on the day. Then it will just be one more long run, aiming for around 18km, before the taper!
 
Oooh! I forgot to mention that we found out our corrals. Dad got into A, Mum got into B, DH got into C, and I got into D. DH will drop back to D though so we can run together. I'm a little disappointed that I didn't push harder to get a better corral. Corral D encompasses a huge range of runners from 2:35 to 3:15. I am right at the beginning of that range with my submitted time of 2:40, and of course DH will be faster than most people too. We'll just have to get up extra early and make sure we're right at the front of the corral so we don't get too held up. There are still 2 more corrals after D though, so at least we'll be ahead of a lot of people.

The good news is, it looks like we're in corral A for the 5k, so we can start right at the front and enjoy short lines for all the photo opportunities! Now fingers crossed that they have a good selection of characters out there, because last year's 5k wasn't the most character filled race they've had lol!
 
YAY for finding out about your corrals. Shame about D....but getting there early is probably a good move.
 

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