Bachelor parties, Supras and long runs

I've been too busy to update this is in a while. I'm pretty much been on the road since my last update. Last weekend, my dad and I drove down to Philly for my brother John's bachelor party. Unfortunately Hurricane Irene didn't want us to execute our original plan for the weekend, but we still ended up making it to a Phillies game before having to head home. Coincidentally, Nancy's brother Doug was also at the game for a different bachelor party for a different guy from Penfield High School, so it was also great to catch up with him a little. So, it wasn't great to drive down to Philly on Friday and come right back Saturday, but after seeing the devastation that storm brought to some areas of Vermont and Northern New York, it seems pretty silly to complain that we had to cut a party short because of it, so we're not complaining. It was great to catch up with some of John's friends and to meet John's future brother-in-law and father in-law.

The upside of weekend getting cut short was that I got an extra night at home. Incidentally, I would get an additional night at home due to cancelled flights from the storm. I finally got on a plane headed for Georgia on Tuesday. It was pretty smooth sailing once I finally got going. We ended up getting two solid days of meetings in and getting everything we needed to get accomplished. My friends there also threw an early birthday "Supra" for me, which involved a large Georgian feast, a cake and a healthy (or unhealthy?) amount of vodka. Birthday's are a much bigger deal in Georgia than they are in the US, which I wrote about previously while I was there for Ivane's birthday. Everytime someone that works with Ivane has a birthday, they shut down the office at about 3pm and have a large celebration in the kitchen. All in all it was a good trip.

Now, I am currently in Weiden, Germany. I had originally planned to be in Oberhof to ski in the ski tunnel there then drive to Weiden tonight, where I will be for work this week. However, I was delayed getting to Munich and didn't land until 7pm yesterday, so it didn't make sense to drive 3 hours in the wrong direction to get to Oberhof, only to turn around and drive 4 hours again today. So, that was a little disappointing, but I did manage to get a long run in this morning and will catch up on some work this afternoon before the rest of the team arrives this evening. I had my first driving experience in Germany yesterday and they drive really fast here, do not get in the fast lane unless you know what you're doing! My hotel is pretty small, one of those deals where the hotel manager is also the waiter, bar tender, chef and lives in the hotel. I'm also relatively sure that my TV is much older than me. It's about 10-inches and there is one English TV station. I am currently watching the Track world championships in German. I have to get a slingbox set up or something.

About that run this morning...that's a good story - I intended to go for a ~2 hour run. There are bike paths that go everywhere in this town, so I figured I would run for an hour in one direction, turn around and come back, perfect, right? How could I screw that up? Well, I'm not sure how it happened, but I managed to get very lost and my "2 hour run" started to remind me of this story from Duncan. After asking for directions from several people who didn't have any idea where my hotel was. I finally found another runner who knew where it was and pointed me in the right direction. Or at least I thought it was the right direction, I somehow ended up running in a circle from there and ran into the same runner about 40 minutes later. Thankfully, he saw me asking someone else for help, ran over, patted me on the back and ran with me all the way back to the hotel. That guy gets massive training karma points for that because I'm not sure how long it would've taken me to find someone else who knew where this hotel is. I wasn't too worried as I don't have a real agenda for today, but still not the greatest feeling to be lost in a foreign country, especially when you know about 3 words of their language, and you've already ran about 18 miles without water, not my brightest moment, but huge thank you to that guy whoever you are! So, my run ended up being a little longer than anticipated, but I felt pretty good.

I'll be in Weiden for a NATO exercise this week and will head to Amsterdam a week from today for meetings on Monday, then fly home Tuesday, drive to Vermont Wednesday and stay there for a few days for a wedding after which I'm going to take a long nap...like a 3-day nap...