Hurricane Survival Trip

The end of the summer/pool-season was rather interesting. First, we got an earthquake  in Baltimore (!) and then the hurricane warning, instructing us to close down the pool and hide in our apartment during the weekend… Everyone was acting crazy, buying everything from the local supermarket. It really felt like we were about to see the world end…

Well, both of those „disasters“ eventually turned out to be not that serious. Earthquake was over — luckily — soon in just couple seconds. Hurricane did come, but wasn’t as strong as expected. But who could know that, right? My cousin lives in NYC and even though it’s just 3 hours away from Baltimore, it was being expected that the hurricane situation would be even worse… and they were actually instructed to evacuate the Manhattan altogether. Hence the hurricane trip to inland (=state of Pennsylvania :-). And I gladly joined her!

The picture above shows our apartment just before we left. All of the other lifeguards stayed, and lot of others came from other pools. And from what I heard, it got quite crazy as far as partying goes… On one hand, I felt bad that I left my brother and others… but on the other, I was glad I wasn’t part of that :-)).

Below, you can find couple pictures from the various places that we visited during our road trip, taken just before all hell broke loose :-).

Calm before the strom…

Somewhere in the state of Pennsylvania… You can actually see the end of the storm!

We eventually ended up in little town called Johnstown. We decided to go for a beer that night and that was quite a lot of fun as I had to prove with more than 2 IDs that I am actually over 21 :-). It was a small pub, so no wonder… but they were really serious about it! But we convinced them and enjoyed more than one drink before we went to bed.

The next day was all about getting back to NYC by night. So we picked a route that headed up north and one of the main stops was Clearfield. Haven’t heard of that one? Me neither, until we were advised to go there because of the burgers :-)).

Apparently, there is one small pub called Denny’s Beer Barrel and it serves the world’s largest hamburgers. They even have these funny challenges, where you can order 2lb burger (or much bigger, given advanced notice…) and are supposed to eat tho whole bloody thing in 1 hour. As you probably know me, guess what we did :-D.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to eat all of that in time… and actually, I wasn’t able to eat more than a half of it during the whole weekend. So my name is not on the famous-eaters wall of the pub, which sucks.

At least I got a reason to go there at least once again :-). Right after that, we drove over to see Pennsylvania Grand Canyon (east coast version of the famous national park :-). And before the sun came down, we also got a chance to see quite a lot of nice scenic views… After that, it was just one long drive to NYC downtown.

Another day in NYC

We got safe to NYC very late… so we went to bed right away. Since I got one more day off, I wanted to make most out of it.

In the morning, I decided to go for a run along Hudson river to see what damage Irene (name given to the hurricane) caused. It wasn’t that bad, you couldn’t really see anything broken down, just couple sand bags that were forgotten :-).

I ran all the way down to Wall Street, where I checked out almost-finished Ground Zero building, a tad bit later I grabbed something to eat and headed back to my cousin’s. I still had all the afternoon and there was an opportunity to ride a bike, so obviously it was very easy to choose what to do :-). I decided to go on a small trip to Nyack. You have to realize that I hadn’t been siting on the bike for like 3 months… but I wasn’t thinking rationally back then :-).

Apart from that, I somehow confused kilometers with miles and instead of doing 60km, I did 60 miles, which is waaaay more (± 100km)!

And God, that hurt! The course was rather flat and I basically followed 9W cycling path (one of the best ones in NYC!). But on my way back, I started cramping, didn’t have enough drinks/food… basically hit the wall. But luckily, I was able to drive to nearest 7Eleven,got some iced-coffee and chocolate… and then it was all much easier and I returned back „home“ safely, even though more than 1 hour later than planned :-).

That was pretty much all I did that day. We went for a small walk with my cousin in the evening, had a nice dinner and also visited Columbia University (another Ivy League school). After that, I got everything ready for my travelling back to Baltimore the next day…

This was the last time I was in NYC in 2011. I didn’t take any pictures, just this video from the pier by Hudson river, which is one of my favorite places! Well, that is if you actually can have a favorite place in NYC, which is awesome anywhere you go :-).

Make sure you watch it in FullHD! Well, that’s all for this post, the next one will be coming soon :-). I really hope that next time I will be able to visit NYC with my brother. It just didn’t work out this summer, so we’d better fix it quite soon :-))

Nautica NYC Triathlon Weekend

After a very looong delay, I finally got around to finish my summer reports. Well, to begin with, the whole summer @ USA was absolutely AWESOME! Sure, there were couple things we didn’t particularly enjoy (like moving to another pool at the beginning/end of pool season), but as a whole, I am really glad we decided to go. And quite frankly — I consider it to be one of the best decisions I’ve ever made in my life!

So let’s go back now… to New York City, where I spent whole 5 days just because of NYC Triathlon. The whole race weekend was totally amazing, the minute I got to NYC, everything was all about sports and triathlon. And I loved it! Even the expo, where it was kinda discouraging to see all of the athletes picking up race packets etc., and me just staring at them (unlike the year bofore). But what the heck, I got some free merchandise, met my cousin and off we were to get ready for Jamaica Underwear Run!

That’s Friday, and since the race day is on Sunday… I got the whole Saturday free. Well except having to attend „a volunteer briefing“ since I was volunteering on the race day :-). The briefing was quick and I was quite glad to see hundreds of other like-minded people, all of them volunteering for one reason — guaranteed entry for next year’s race… Well, probably not all of them, but every other person told me that they are doing this because of their plans to race NYC Tri in 2012.

For the volunteering, I chose „athlete recovery“ zone, which was in my opinion one of the best places to be (compared to transition zones etc., where nothing really interesting happened :-). I got to see all of the finishers right after they crossed he finish line, provided them with foods/drinks and made sure that they got medical assistance if needed.

The briefing was taking place in Central Park, which was awesome, because one of my cousin’s friends was having a b-day party on sheep meadow. It was probably my first birthday celebration in US, and definitely in Central Park :-). Lots of food, (alcoholic) drinks, people… Fun times, I had even experienced my first Piñata.

With the b-day party done, I spent the rest of the day just walking around and absorbing the NYC atmosphere, which is unique! The race day was next morning and since we had to get up quite early (4am — because of the transtion zone set-up), you would probably expect that we would hit the bed soon… Well, not the case as one of my close friends recently moved to NYC and proposed going out for a beer.

So we went – to Brooklyn :-). It wasn’t just one beer, as usually… And to make long story short, I got back just 2 hours prior to when the alarm clock went crazy. So I didn’t get much sleep, but what the heck. Carpe diem, there will be plenty of time to get all the sleep needed in the grave, as one of my friends likes to say.

Race Day

The race day was just phenomenal. It was very long indeed, the weather was atrocious… but all of the athletes were quite determined and even though the start got postponed for more than half an hour, it was ALL awesome! What could be more descriptive than the official race day video from organizers (if you focus on the guy with umbrella at 1:12, you might find him familiar :-).

I enjoyed working as a volunteer quite a bit! We had a great team, lotta fun and had a chance to see all of the athletes right after they crossed the finish line, congratulate them and even take their pictures and what not. Once the elites were done, age-groupers started coming and it reminded me of the times when I worked by the finish line of Prague International Marathon. Simply awesome, true story!

After the race was over, my cousin and I went for a walk in NYC, grabbed an awesome sushi meal… and just enjoyed ourselves after very tiring day. The next day in the morning I was about to leave for Baltimore very early, so nothing really interesting, except when I missed the connecting train and got late to work, which was sort of a tradition for anyone travelling to NYC :-).

Next post is coming tomorrow and it will be a small follow-up on our one of the last trips to Philly & Wash DC. Right after that, it’s Miami time, baby!!!

Ohiopyle Rafting, Black Eyed Peas gig

It’s incredible how fast the time goes. I don’t know why there wasn’t any blog-update sooner, but that’s just how it is :-)

What has happened from the last blog-post:

• Numerous heat-waves (having 40° in the shade is kinda normal for us now)
• Ohiopyle White Water Rafting
• Visit to Pittsburgh
• Black Eyed Peas gig
• Lots of BBQs, Pool Parties and also one B-Day celebration
• Lots of shopping, both online and offline :-)
• New (totally awesome) waterproof camera
• Finally got a working internet connection

I hope I didn’t forget anything. The days are just literally flying by and keeping track of what did or did not happen is somehow boring :-). We came down here to enjoy the summer, not to write a book about it…

Having said that, let me start with the white water adventure we took a week ago. It’s been the best day so far. A friend of our friend recommended it as a part of trip to Pittsburgh (most stunning night-city view I’ve ever seen) and we will thank be grateful to him, well, forever.

We did Lower Yough rafting trip, which is medium difficulty (Class III & IV). In other terms, the drop per 1 mile is ± 25 feet. If you compare it to  Class V rapids (over 100-foot drop per 1 mile), it’s really childish :-). But since this was the very first experience with white water rafting for most of us, I think it was perfectly suited and we all just had the time of our lives. And we didn’t even mind it was pouring all day long, as it made the river a bit more wild. We all ended up in the freaking cold water anyway – not because of major rapids, but because of the very infantile game we played when we were pushing each other of the raft :-).

The whole trip took more than 7 hours (not to mention the 4-hour drive to Ohiopyle State Park) and we even had a picnic-style lunch in the middle of it, which finally convinced most of the guys that PBJ sandwich is a thing of delight :-).  And once we got back and took a warm shower, off we were to see Pittsburgh.

We managed to arrive at around 8pm, but that was OK since we were planning to see it at night and our only item on agenda was Pittsburgh Penguins Arena. We made it eventually, even though the way was a bit “jumpy” and included a lot of highway crossings :-). The other thing we did is called The Duquesne Incline, something like a Pittsburgh-version of Petřínská lanovka :-). Having done that, we got back to car and headed back to Baltimore, which was more than 5 hours away (mind you that it was 1am already). We arrived back and safe at 5am. Hell of a day with way to many things happening (“too much drama” would be a Columbian way of saying that :-).

Simply, one of the best days of my life so far.

The only thing left was the return of our car, which happened to be a 4-wheel drive Toyota Rav4. Renting a car was actually a funny story which included lot of hick-ups. But we were not responsible for any of those and since everything worked out really well, I think we can just skip that :-). So when we got back, we drove to the 24-hour parking lot, tried to clean coffee/ice-cream of the seats and then dropped a key into a drop-off key box. So that’s for my first-ever driving&renting-a-car experience in USA. Everything went well, we didn’t get charged any extras..

The trip mentioned above required quite a lot of planning, which in effect meant that we didn’t have a chance to go somewhere else during our days off. And the other thing is that the weather in Baltimore area in last couple of weeks was just crazy. Too much heat to do anything outside, so we were mostly chilling at the pool or in our air-conditioned apartment. I don’t remember a recent month that I was as lazy as I am now… But what the heck, we live only once!

Another thing worth mentioning is Black Eyed Peas concert, which was stunning. It was held in a place, where they actually started their career more than couple years ago – MerriWeather Post Pavilion. We got the cheapest tickets, so our viewing-spot wasn’t that fancy… But what the hack – we could still (sometimes) see the stage, Fergie… so everything was awesome!

Other than that, usual stuff… we did some BBQs, had a B-Day celebration for one of our team-members, went clubbing couple times — especially to our favorite — Padonia Station (well, that’s the only place in our “suburb”), where they have Thursday specials: Dollar Beer Night. The average spending is around 15$ / person, so you do the math :-D

Ouch, one more thing – we got a new underwater camera! It’s Panasonic Lumix TS3, outdoor waterproof camera… And it’s just awesome. If it wasn’t for some issues with the back-display, forcing us to return it and got a replacement… All would be perfect. But I’m sure it will work out and in the end, we will have splendid memories captures on both image and moving-image :-) And the best thing, it shots FullHD videos!

I was about to mention my trip to NYC, where I volunteered for Nautica NYC Triathlon that I competed in last year. However, that spot is gonna be quite lengthy, so I guess it will be better to separate it from my (i)regular reports!

Take it easy, ya’ll!

What’s planned? :-)

• Trip to Philadelphia and Washington DC
• One more visit to NYC
• Then some post-season work
• And then, FINALLY, awesome traveling in Florida !!!
• As usually, all the pictures are to be found on my Flickr account!