First off, apologies for the lack of a blog post on Friday evening,
there was a certain lack of internet at our hotel that evening.
Friday
morning we awoke to a cloudy and somewhat windy morning. The planned workout
was 2x2km time trials/races, thus that is what we did. Fortunately for us, the
wind was blowing from the start line towards the finish line, which gave us a
nice tailwind push during the pieces. It also created rather large waves from
about the start line to the finish line. Oh well, we got the pieces done and
had a good workout. Admittedly, by the time we got back to the dock, we were
all a little cold and wet.
Before
the second workout we found ourselves again at WalMart. This time around, we
didn’t get any ‘talking to Americans’ style questions, however we did pick up a
fairly large amount of ‘travel snacks’ as well as some Vanilla and Cherry Coke,
and who could forget a little more Fat Tire Beer (needed to bring some back to
share). Also there’s just the joy/entertainment of WalMart in the US, so much
more awesome than the ones here in Canada.
Soon enough
it was back to the lake for a final row. The wind was still there, but had come
down a bit from what it was in the morning. Because it was our last row, we
went up the river beyond the start line for a nice cat 6. After being out on
the water for about 75 minutes, it was time to call it quits because we needed
to load the boats back onto the cars for the journey home. This time around,
boat loading took considerably less time than before mainly because it wasn’t
snowy and cold, and everyone was there.
As it
was our last dinner at the all you can eat buffet, there may have been a little
bit of extra enthusiasm in the eating. This was heightened when one of the
cafeteria workers came out and told us if we wanted we could have all the extra
pizza they had because we were the last ones there and the cafeteria was
closing for their reading week the next morning. This made us all quite happy, particularly
Jerome, who has been known for his feats of eating exceptional amounts of
pizza.
Shortly
after dinner, the van driven by Mark and Dave left to drive overnight back to
London, in order to be able to arrive on time for and be rested for a Swedish
House Mafia concert in Toronto on Saturday night (which we are all kind of
Jealous we couldn’t have gone to. The boats they had on the roof of their car
were back at the boathouse when we got there to unload last night, so we believe
that they made it safely back.
We (my
car) left Georgia at just after 4 am Saturday morning headed back to London.
Unfortunately it was not such a starlight voyage through the Smokey mountains.
It was a rather rainy, foggy and dark trip through the mountains. This made the
first three hours of the drive slightly less fun than they could have been. And
by slightly rainy and foggy I mean wipers on full speed, reduced driving speed
and fog lights on. The early departure made the first few hours back on the
interstate better driving because there was much less traffic than normal on
the road. We arrived back at the boathouse around 6pm, and everyone was back at
their homes by 7.
Two
hours later (9pm), we learned that Matt’s car was just crossing into Canada (an
hour from London). This put us about 3-4 hours ahead of them, though they did
leave Georgia an hour behind us; and then stopped at Waffle House, and Chipotle
(ok we stopped there too, but who wouldn’t), and Denny’s, and for various
additional gas stops. Anyway, everyone is home safe.
This
effectively concludes the Georgia Trip Blog for 2013, stay tuned over the next
week or so though, I hope to post a summary video shortly – and I will try to
make it better than our Harlem Shake video. Thanks for reading, hope it was
enjoyable.