When you have a young baby it is amazing how often people will stop you just to look at your baby.  We traveled to Jacksonville, Florida for Thanksgiving and like most visits ventured off to St. Augustine to walk around town.  While walking amongst hundreds of people a lady came from across the street hollering, “ohhhhhh, I gotta see that baby”.  We obliged and she was friendly and of course Amelia gave her a huge smile.  She seems to brighten the days of countless strangers with her big smiles.  Smiles are free and so are digital pictures.

On November 10, 2001 I signed-up for Ironman Florida…  The event didn’t take place until November 9, 2002…  That is a full year in advance.  For people who are around the sport that doesn’t really sound odd because it is that way for every race in North America.  Last July I signed up for Ironman Lake Placid which takes place on July 23, 2006.  A full year in advance this race took less than one day to fill up all 1800+ spots.  I won’t even go into the challenge this can set forth for those who stress about the race for a full year; that is quite the build-up.  It’s now February and I have been calling around looking for a hotel to stay and I’m not having a lot of luck.  Yes, I’m booking a hotel a full 5 months in advance of a race, in a town that hosted the 1980 WINTER OLYMPICS and I am therefore a procrastinator.  A lot of things can happen during the course of a year with a little luck I’ll be able to hold the course as I have on two previous occasions and make it to the starting line healthy.  The fact is that many people don’t for various reasons but there will be hotel cancellations.  I’ll just have to work a little harder to snatch them when they come available!

Coming from a recreation and leisure background I have had long discussions about this topic.  In the U.S., I think many of us spend too much time working.  To me it is evident when we ask someone; so what do you do?  Most of the time people answer with whatever it is they do to make money, to pay the mortgage.  I take note when people answer with something different.  What do we do?  I like to think that we live the adventure.  For the most part I have to think that our careers have been quite good too.  I won’t complain about our careers but I think our quest for adventure and passion for life definitely take the lead when it comes to what we do.

There seems to be a lot of people taking note these days about the pursuit of too much stuff.  How to remove clutter from our lives, consume less, conserve more, recycle, end the endless pursuit of more.  When I was running around the 1.3-mile St. Louis Arch Park a few weeks ago on a sunny day, I had a strong thought; Lighten-up and Live.  I don’t think that a thought like that negates the importance of the above but sometimes we just need to remember that most of us are generally good people, take a deep breath and live… 
Running to me seems like a really clean pursuit.  It is pure and natural and it might be one of those pursuits where one more is all right.  That is the exact feeling that I had as I ran lap after lap around the St. Louis Arch in January in shorts.  When I run in a race it is interesting when I realize that there is only one mile to go, or when we take it one mile at a time.  When I was training for my first Ironman I would frequently run the same six-mile loop.  It was a good feeling during the race when I realized I only had 6 miles to go; one loop of my training run, and interestingly enough those were the best running miles of the day.    

We just arrived home from a spur of the moment vacation to St. Louis, Missouri.  We have never visited St. Louis for a vacation and chose it this year for a few reasons:
1        It was within a 7-8 hour radius by car.  2        It was in the direction where we could find warm weather. 

3        Lots to do (a lot of that for FREE). 

We booked a hotel on www.priceline.com  $46/night for the Marriot Renaissance right downtown.  We packed a lot into our trip and also made sure we packed in a lot of quality time with Miss Amelia.  A few of the highlights were the Shaw Botanical Gardens and with so many GREAT photo opportunities we had to go back for a second trip!  We also had a great time at the St. Louis Zoo.  It is an amazing zoo and part of Forest Park which is a huge park with tons of municipal attractions in addition to green space and really cool bike and foot trails.  We checked-out the Arch which is truly amazing and over 600ft in the air.   They have a cool museum and also IMAX theatre for viewing the shows you normally see at the full-fledged IMAX dome theatres.  They also have some heavy-duty “airport” type security.  We decided not to spend the $10 each to ride to the top so another free day.  We visited the Anheiser Busch Brewery and it was a great time and for as large as it is they keep the place immaculate.  At the end of the tour you get to choose two glasses of a wide variety of beers.  Another stop that we made was at a brewery called Schlafly Bottleworks.  We really enjoyed it there and thought that the beers were certainly good, not quite good enough to write home about but the brewery and people were well worth it.  We did however really like the Tap Room by Schlafly where we stopped by for dinner and special Scottish Ale that was phenomenal.  They also had the best dessert that we have ever had called STP (Sticky Toffee Pudding).  Our daily adventures started-out each day in search of coffee!  We had a lot of fun and eventually found our favorite coffee place called the St. Louis Coffee Oasis where we befriended the owners and immigrants from the country of Jordan.  They served outstanding home roasted coffee and great food and desserts.

Overall this ranks right up there with our top adventures.