The rest of the April road trip

I dropped the ball on continuing with the posts in a timely manor. So, instead of trying to write anything decent, I'll pretty much just make this a post of unedited cell phone photos with very minimal writing. Once I actually work on the SLR photos, I'll put them up on flickr.

Boston, Massachusetts 

Tuesday, April 18, 2017

The day after the Boston Marathon, my friends & teammates were heading out of Boston, so I was now on my solo vacation. I had no actual plans at this point. I had to be out of my hotel by 11 or noon or whatever checkout time was and didn't know if I was going to stay in Boston or travel elsewhere, but was leaning toward elsewhere. I had just spent a few days in Boston, it was time to explore some more.

In the morning, I went out for a run with my phone in hand, to take a few photos along the way.

It was the perfect morning for a run. It was cool and there was no humidity... why couldn't it have been like this the day before? Oh well.. 

I took one more photo on this run, in the middle of the above photos. I somehow caught this out of the corner of my eye while running. I'm not sure how or why I saw it, but I'm glad I did. 

No more hurting people. #peace #seenonmyrun #bostonstrong

A post shared by Vicki Zandbergen (@vickizandbergen) on Apr 18, 2017 at 6:19pm PDT

After my run, I packed up and checked out, put my stuff in my car, which was booked to stay in the garage all day, so I set out to wander and explore. And.... it got cold... cloudy... windy. 

I checked out Faneuil Hall. 

Then headed out for more wandering/exploring.

I considered getting a cannoli from Mike's since it's apparently the thing to do.... then I saw this line:

I guess it IS the thing to do... but I didn't want to wait.

So... I went to Boston Public Market, where I got a coffee and a delicious vanilla bean donut,

sat and contemplated where to go next.

I decided on heading to the White Mountains. Checked for some options of places to stay, figured out a rough game plan, and then did some beer shopping (also in the market).

** ok.. interjecting here with something sort of funny that just happened. The mail just came, so I went to get it out of the box and in it was this:

That makes me feel slightly better about taking so long to finish up writing about April! haha **

New Hampshire

Tuesday, April 18, 2017

I arrived in Lincoln, NH at some point late afternoon or early evening. Checked into the Holiday Inn Express, was upgraded to a larger room since there weren't many people staying during the off season. Brought my stuff to my room, and walked to Woodstock Inn Station & Brewery to get some dinner and beer. 

Wednesday, April 19, 2017

This was a day of hiking at Greely Ponds Trail and Hancock Notch (with a bit of post-holing... post-holing to mid-thigh!) and just enjoying being outdoors.. until it started raining. At that point, I headed to a One Love Brewery for some food (and a beer) and then called it a day. 

In a shop window.

Wednesday, April 20, 2017

I went out for a short little run from the hotel around Lincoln in the morning and took a few photos. It was such a pretty morning!

My plan for this day was pretty loose. I would most likely cross into Canada at some point, but planned to stop several places on the way to do more exploring.

First stop: Franconia Ridge, Falling Waters Trail.

2nd stop: Littleton (for no real reason, just wanted to wander around a town with my camera)

3rd Stop: a lake in Vermont that looked pretty from the road. 

4th and final stop before Canada: Newport, VT.

I walked around by the beach for a bit and then to the East Side Restaurant for some food, since I hadn't had anything since breakfast. After this, it was time to head to my parents' house where I would stay for the night before driving back home to Kitchener. Actually, I think I stayed two nights. 

So there you have it. I can now get back to more recent/current posts... just in time for ENDURrun to start this weekend, the one time of year when I consistently blog. :)

Correr en Cayo Coco

I just got back from vacation, staying at the Emperador Laguna Villas Resort in Cayo Coco for one week.

I went for several runs during my vacation in Cuba, including a 17 km long run. I brought a camera with me on this run just in case I saw interesting things on the way.

I started my run first thing Monday morning, leaving my husband and friends to have breakfast without me. I headed out of the resort, past the gates and turned left to start my adventure. As I approached the first roundabout, there was already a photo worthy moment: two wild horses were grazing in the grass between resorts.

Making my way down the road, I decided to turn left and head toward the ocean just before Sol Cayo Coco. As I ran down, I noticed that I had been to this area a couple days before, but had approached via water and beach. This time I came by road. I had arrived at the rocky point, so I climbed up and snapped some photos.

 

 

From this point, I looked to the east at the resorts where I would head next: Sol & Melia. The resorts looked quite nice from up here, so I was intrigued to check them out. I carefully climbed down from the rocky, coral peak and ran back out to the road. Next stop would be Sol Cayo Coco.

I ran around the Sol, which was a nice looking resort, much smaller than the Emperador Laguna. The buildings looked nice and the beach smaller and windier, but still quite beautiful. I didn’t really stop anywhere at this resort, I kept on running.

When I arrived at Melia Cayo Coco, I was instantly impressed with the grounds. Everything looked well kept. Again, this resort was a lot smaller than the one where we stayed. I decided to check out their beach as well and when I arrived, I was pleasantly surprised to find a brown pelican right close to where I stepped of the steps to the sand.

The bird stood so quietly on the beach and I could easily approach him. I decided I needed a self-portrait with my new friend.

After hanging out for a minute or two, I realized that I wasn’t getting too far in my run (I was only a few km in at this point) so I should probably keep going.

Melia is the end of the road, so when I left the resort, I was heading back past Sol and Emperador again, this time continuing through the next roundabout where I would pass by more resorts. I did not stop at these, as I wanted to head out to areas where I could see the ocean from the road.

While running along a long stretch of road, I ran into two men working on the median of the road. Well, one of them was working and the other appeared to be hanging out with his friend. I stopped to talk to them for a few minutes as I had actually met the non-working guy (who king of looked a bit like Usher) the day before at Playa Prohibida and he recognized me (I was running the prior day as well). He spoke Spanish and French, but not English, so it was a bit of a choppy conversation, but we got by. I let them know that I was going to keep on running and started moving on.

I discovered a path that looked interesting and I could hear waves, so I thought it might be a fun place to run. It was more sandy (go figure) than I thought, so it was a bit tough to run on, but was still a nice change from the road. I saw lots of hoof prints in the sand, so I’m pretty sure this is where they do the horse riding to the beach and along the beach that you see advertised in the excursions from the hotels. It lead me to the water, where I briefly ran along the beach before heading back out to the road.

The path and the end of the path where it opens to the beach:

Back on the road, the next section became hilly, but gorgeous. There was so much foliage along the sides of the road and the road ran along the shore, so there was a wonderful ocean breeze. I saw a sign up ahead, so I decided to run up to see what it was. My turn-around point turned out to be a bar and grill, but sadly, I didn’t have any money on me to stop and enjoy.

The run back to the resort was pretty uneventful, although, at one point I heard a loud, long call of “hola” so I turned and saw that it was the Usher look-alike calling at me from down away from the road. I gave greetings of “hola” and “Buenos dias” to the two guys as I kept running, wanting to run without any further stops on the way back.

I arrived back at the resort and stopped at exactly 2 hours. My time wasn’t too bad for the distance considering the stops I made. I wasn’t going to be concerned about the quality of my run too much as I definitely wanted to take in the sights and experience of running in Cuba.

My Run in Cayo Coco:

Back from Vacation

I’m now back in Ontario after a week long vacation in Orlando, Florida. I had great plans of running at least 5 days when we were there. I did 3. All in all, I guess that’s not too bad… we were on vacation after all and I really didn’t want to set alarms to get up at the crack of dawn to run. We were vacationing along with another couple, so we had plans to do things together during the day, which also makes it more difficult to get runs in.

Of my 3 runs, 2 out of 3 were pretty uneventful.

Run #1: I ran one evening through our vacation property, through the property across the street and then down the street for a bit of an out and back. It was a sweaty run, of course (it was Florida in late May after all), but other than that, nothing notable besides dodging a few lizards.

Run #2: I decided to head run around Sea World, Aquatica, and surrounding area. I ran out to the first main intersection, crossed the street by CVS, and proceeded to run up a few steps up to the sidewalk on the other side of the road. Me being the ever so coordinated person that I am, tripped up the top step and scraped up my knee. I squirted water on it from my camelback to clean up some of the blood and continued my run. I ran past Sea World and a loop around Aquatica when I noticed the angry looking clouds behind me. I felt a few drops and thought maybe I’d stay in front of the storm the whole way back. It went okay for a while, I was only a couple miles from the hotel, so I wasn’t too concerned. I got all the way back to the road the hotel was on before the rain started to pick up. I turned into the Marriott Cypress Harbour property and it started to pour. I headed toward our villa and the wind started to pick up. I stopped to stretch on the steps (covered) and watched the rain and wind around me. I was drenched, but I was mere minutes away from a nice shower and clean, dry clothes.

Run #3: Another uneventful run down nice long roads, a quick run through a Hilton vacation property and back to our hotel. Nothing to write home about, yet I appear to be writing about it here.

Now that I’m back, I had plans of a long run today, but that didn’t happen. I did some unpacking, went for a walk, enjoyed the nice hot weather (I couldn’t get enough of it in Florida, so I thought I’d enjoy it here as well) and I’ll get up for a bit of a run in the morning.

Good night, everyone!