travels, races, and other musings

It's been one year since I was diagnosed with breast cancer. Not that this is something to celebrate, but it's going to be a hard day to forget for the rest of my life. As I've said previously, I'm not an "everything happens for a reason" person but I do find that sometimes the course of our lives can shift in unexpected ways when we face great challenges.  As I stood on the podium this morning to teach my BODYCOMBAT class, I couldn't help but reflect on the fact that if I had not faced the challenge of having cancer, I likely would not have ever become a BODYCOMBAT institutor. Taking that journey was far outside my comfort zone and not something I ever thought I would do.  When I started working for Fitness Connection 5 years ago, I took a BODYPUMP class for the first time and immediately fell in love with it. I loved the music and how it made me feel. I had a big goofy grin on my face the whole class. I also took a BODYCOMBAT class. I did not love it. I

Copenhagen to Austin We woke up at 3:15 AM to be out the door by 3:45 AM to make it to the airport at least two hours early for our 7:25 AM flight. Yay. While I was finishing up the last of the packing, Roger said that we had an email from British Airways. Our flight was delayed by two hours. We all piled back into bed with our clothes on and set an alarm for two hours later.  We woke up (again) at 5:45 and hauled our stuff to the train station. There was a 6:27 train to the airport so that worked out really well. We were at the airport by 6:50 but the checkin wasn’t open and things were confusing because they had us stand in a line to “rebook” us and I kept telling them we didn’t need to rebook and I finally heard them letting other people check in for our flight and I asked why we couldn’t and she said, “well, we need to rebook you because you’ll miss your connection.” I explained that, no, we wouldn’t, as our connection wasn’t until 11:45 AM so then she finally let us check in and g

Copenhagen For our final morning in Copenhagen, I booked us a time slot for Rosenborg Castle. Timed entry is required for this castle, even with a Copenhagen card. It didn’t cost anything and I just had to show verification of our timed entry upon arrival and then our Copenhagen cards. I chose the first slot at 10 AM when they opened and it was absolutely the right call. We practically had the place to ourselves and by the time we were leaving, the place was starting to get really busy.  We spent about an hour at Rosenborg and we all agreed that we liked it better than Christianborg. So if you are ever in Copenhagen and you only have time for one castle, pick Rosenborg. It’s older and somewhat smaller, but still really impressive and beautiful in its own way. There’s also a vault in the basement with an impressive array of royal…stuff, including the crown jewels of Denmark. I have pretty mixed feelings these days about crown jewels (colonizers, yay…) but they were still interesting to

Copenhagen Nobody slept particularly well. The beds weren’t super comfortable and the room temperature wasn’t quite right. I always sleep well on the ship but this bed just didn’t feel right. It was like sleeping on a trampoline. Every time Roger moved, I felt every little tiny adjustment like a ripple across the bed. It was awful.  So we slept in a bit and got up around 8 AM and went down to breakfast which was included at the hotel. It was a decent breakfast, actually. Many things about the hotel were great, like how close it was to the central train station. We hopped on the metro and went to get tickets for the 10 AM canal boat tour. I had purchased the Copenhagen Card prior to the trip. With the card we paid around $300 for the three of us for three days to have unlimited public transportation and entrance into just about every museum, castle, and attraction you could imagine in and around Copenhagen. We probably saved close to $100 by using the Copenhagen card as opposed to buyi

Disembarkation and Copenhagen  In the Caribbean we like second seating dinner but in Europe we prefer first seating. A lot of people are the opposite. This, unfortunately, means early breakfast on disembarkation day. No thanks! We spoke with our serving team and they told us they had an open table in their second seating and we could come for later breakfast. So we slept in and went to breakfast in Animator’s at 8:15. After that we waited to get off the ship. And waited. Apparently passport control was really backed up and they were holding us (growing pains again, apparently). Many people in our cruise group complained about what a mess disembarkation was.  We finally got off the ship and made the short walk to the city bus stop and found a bus there waiting. Only a couple other families were taking the city bus. We got to the metro station and found the train and took it to the central station in Copenhagen. Our hotel was only about a 5 minute walk from there. We dropped off our bagg

At Sea By now you know the drill: laundry, light breakfast, laundry, work out, back to the room and shower and finish up the laundry that Roger had tended while I was working out. I didn’t feel like going to Cabana’s and Emmaline was still sleeping after all this and I wanted to be there if she needed me so Roger brought me back a plate of food.  I was all done getting ready and having breakfast and Emmaline was still sleeping so I just let her. Finally around 10 AM she woke up. I called the health center to report her illness and they told me that we could bring her down but it would be $128 and they left it up to me. I told them I just wanted to report it since I know we were supposed to. They honestly didn’t seem to care. I considered getting out our Covid tests since Covid can often present as nausea and vomiting, but I decided to wait and see how she was doing. I had brought her a banana from the fitness center, which she ate. Then she got herself dressed and said that she felt ab

Alesund We lost an hour. I forgot to mention we lost an hour the day before too. We had gained them going into Iceland and now they were gone again. There were so many time zone changes on this trip. We lost 6 hours from the US to the UK, then we lost another going to France. Then going to Iceland we gained two hours and then back the other way going to Norway (they did both of those across two days which was nice). But because of all these time changes it was like a nonstop Daylight Saving Time changes and I spent a lot of trip feeling jet-lagged and off-kilter because of it.  So we slept in, but also tried to get up at a reasonable hour which was 8 AM. Emmaline did not find this reasonable and did a LOT of complaining. Finally we all went off for a very light breakfast before picking up the day’s scavenger hunt, which was slightly different. They supplied photos of flags and we had to identify which country had that flag and the name of a crew member from that country. It was harder

At Sea Here we go again. Another round of laundry. Why, you may be wondering, did you do so much laundry? Well, we packed six days of clothes, but we need to stick to sort of a sea day schedule which meant we needed to do laundry on those days, plus the laundry machines just don’t hold much so we were either going to have to do multiple loads on one day or smaller loads every few days and we took the latter approach, mostly because it was just easier to do the load when our little bag was full, but also because we could really only get one machine at a time, even with me getting up at 7 AM to get it done. I usually had to go to multiple laundry rooms to find an open machine. About those growing pains on the Dream… So I started the load, went and had a light snack, went back and moved the load to the dryer and went to the gym, at which point Roger took over. It was a system that ended up working well. I actually think this was our last load and I managed to do two that morning. I can’t

Akureyri For Akureyri (ah-koo-ray-ree) we booked a small group tour through Saga, who provides a variety of single or multi-day excursions throughout Iceland. They had good ratings and I thought it might be nice to take in some more of the natural beauty of Iceland. I wasn’t exactly sure where we were going. I knew a lake and a waterfall were involved though. Sign me up! We had an 8:45 AM meeting time for a 9:00 tour. We waited until 9:15 and then the tour guide got word that the final family we were waiting for wasn’t coming. So it was us, Larry and Janee from our cruise meet group (they were also with us in Cherbourg), one other family and one single guy, who turned out to be a former crew member onboard who was done with his contract as an actor on the main stage theatre. He was a nice kid and we chatted with him throughout the day. Anyway, on our drizzly and windy morning, we made a thirty minute drive to the first stop, which was Goðafoss, “waterfall of the gods.” It was stunning.