San Antonio!
Race Day: It was in the 30's when we headed out the door to catch the shuttle bus to the race start. I had brought gloves, but there were ones in the goody bag, they came in handy!! Jim and I had throw-away shirts, and Anne and Robert used disposable clear rain ponchos to help keep warm. The bus drop-off point seemed like it was a long way from the race start! We had just gotten into our corral when we spotted some WISHers:
San Antonio had a 2 minute delay between each corral starting, we ended up waiting 52 minutes before we started. Ouch! I know that it was done that way to avoid congestion, but it was hard walking a few feet, standing for two minutes, walking a few more feet, standing a couple more minutes. Finally it was time to start!! Soon someone going by stopped to chat about WISH. At first I thought she was confusing us with Make a WISH, but it turned out she was DisneyDudette. Cool! Jim and I walked together for awhile, then he pulled ahead and Anne and I hung together.
In Philly Anne and I walked almost the entire course with a woman from Chicago. At about mile 5 we heard someone calling our names....it was Mary Kay from the Philly race! How cool was that?!? Out of 30,000 racers we ran (or in our case walked) into each other.
Here is a picture of one of the houses we passed on the course:
There was a lot to see on the course, lots of crowd support most of the way, and 15 bands for the half-marathoners. Unfortunately the race ended with a bit of an uphill - that was mean and cruel!!
But, I guess the race organizers tried to make up for it with the most amazing collection of goodies at the race end. Anne has a complete list, but in addition to our fabulous medal there were towels, water, power drinks, bananas, bagels, oranges, apples, bags of pretzels, crackers, multiple kinds of potato chips, trail mix, some type of gummy candy, strawberry smoothies, fruit bars, and free beer. Wow!!
We made our way to the W area to meet up with our fellow WISHers, and after Bill finished the full we walked back to our hotel to clean up and rest a little before heading out to meet up for a great Mexican dinner. We great time celebrating but soon it was time to head back and get organized for heading home in the morning.
Day Four: Heading home. We didn't know how much time to allow to get to the airport and through security on a Monday morning, and as it turned out we spent a total of about 30 minutes doing it all - so we were at the airport nearly 3 hrs before our flight. Luckily we spotted Susie and Bill waiting for their flights and we had a great time chatting away until it was time to head home.
So - it was an amazing, wonderful few days!