When I write my blog entries, I almost always edit my photos first, often placing them on the entry in the order I want them, and then finally writing. With the old saying of a picture being worth a thousand words, sometimes I’m tempted to just publish them for a short amount of time, maybe an hour, before even writing anything, just letting the photos tell the story for me. It was really tempting to publish the photos on this entry without comments for quite a while.
As a teen, I really enjoyed writing, even winning a scholarship to attend the Center for Creative Youth, a summer program at Wesleyan University, an intensive program in which my concentration was creative writing. When I think back to the major essay I read at the audition process, a day in the life of a dog, I still cringe a bit, though somehow it worked.
I’ve sort of shied away from writing a bit since then, though working on my blogging 3xs a week goal, helps a lot.
As you may have noticed, I recently had some blog entries pre-written and posted as I’ve been in Florida to prepare for and run in the 17th annual Walt Disney World Marathon. In this Topical Tuesday I’ll be talking about some things that happened on the trip on the first few days, starting with my plane ride on American Airlines. (With the sole exception noted, all photos on this entry were taken with a friend’s Canon Elph camera, on loan to me while I try to decide on a compact camera suitable for runs and travel. I did miss my Leica on the trip very much).
Though I always take photos from my seat on my plane trips, I honestly think the photo above is one of the prettiest ones I’ve ever taken.
This next one was taken as we were flying over mountains in Colorado, a photo that would prove to be ironically funny later on after I landed in Florida and found out they were having one of the coldest January’s in recent memory
I don’t know what it is about airplane flying that gets to me, I’m just always in the mood to hear about the online food choices. Not that I always get them, I just find them a fun part of the journey. I know the prices are excessive (they have a captive audience the way movie theaters do), yet I absolutely had to find out how good (or not) a $3 cookie billed as gourmet was, so I ordered one and happily milk was still free.
To my delight (and somewhat to my surprise) the cookie was wonderful. In fact, the only way it could have been better has had they been able to serve it warm, which of course, would be a logistical nightmare in flight. The cookie was so good in fact that I also got one with milk on the return flight.
In addition to getting to run in a new state (that makes two out of the ten I need to complete to be a junior member of the 50 Staters Marathon running club), the visit gave me a chance to hang out with my mom and stepdad who live in a city that’s about an hour and a half away from Orlando. Knowing me as well as they do, the second night I was there they made sure to take me to Boston Lobster with an all you can eat buffet featuring sushi, crab legs, crab cakes, mussels, clams, oysters and whole lobsters. My mom took this photo of me:
and then I used my iPhone to take this one and post it immediately to Facebook with only the caption of “Dinner!”.
One of my main concerns about the trip, and one reason why my mom, stepdad and I were staying in Orlando days before the race, was how smoothly I could pick up my race packet and number. My mom thought the race expo was quite crowded, however, it was much less packed then I’ve seen others. Then again, about 75,000 people signed up for the half marathon and marathon events (with about 5000 of them signing up for both, the Goofy Challenge), and not everyone came out days early to beat the crowds. Here’s a shot looking down at the expo.
The hotel we stayed at is Shades of Green, for those in the military (including those who have retired) and their families. My stepdad is retired U.S. Navy with over two decades of active service. Shades of Green used to be called The Disney Inn, it’s still a Disney Resort, and there’s a Mickey Mouse in the lobby. Here’s another photo of me with Mickey from my mom (she’s camera shy, so she prefers taking photos of me).
It’s something of a tradition for me to take and later post a photo representative of where I slept the night before a big race. While the hotel room was nice, it was kind of nondescript, so for my pre-race hotel photo, I snapped a photo of the grotto the night before.
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