I'm in Florida

I'm in Florida now. We got in at about 9pm and we left at about 7am. That's 14 hours of driving. We could've made it in about 13 hours, but here are the things that held us up:

1) Detour by following the HOV lane in Houston that put us downtown
2) Two spots of bad traffic
3) Ate dinner with Betsy at a sit down restaurant for about an hour

Betsy left about 30 minutes before us and at one point was 50 miles ahead of us. She got caught in traffic, called us, and we took an alternate route. We met up at an intersection where we were heading east and she was coming from the north and then turning east. Completely by coincidence, we were the 3rd car behind her after that stoplight. Crazy. Also, you know you've run out of things to talk about on a car trip when you start estimating how many miles wide the Central Time Zone is. And if you are wondering, at one point, the CTZ goes from the Arizona, New Mexico, Mexico border all the way to about 25 miles east of Panama City Beach. We think that's about 1500 miles wide. The car ride really wasn't that bad. We made great time. At one point, we went an entire tank of gas without stopping.

I almost hit two animals. There was a deer strolling across the road in Florida. It didn't even get the deer in headlights look, either. It just kind of looked at us like we were in it's territory and kept walking across the road. THen, I was about 1 mile from our condo and a cat ran in the road. I saw it go underneath my car. You know that feeling and you can tell when an animal runs in front of your car versus when an animal runs underneath your car. This little black kitten ran underneath my car. I thought that I had just killed a cat and that sucks since I have 2 cats of my own. When I slammed on my brakes, I was fully prepared to stop and and check on the cat and see if I killed it or if I had to put it outs of it's misery. As I was slowing down, I looked left and the cat was running away into the bushes. Holy shit, that cat freaking lived! I didn't even hit it. It must have run out in front of me, missed the front tires of my car, stopped in its tracks and froze, and when I slowed down, in ran between the front and the back tire on the driver side of the car. That was the luckiest cat in the world last night and it's really ironic that the cat was a black cat.

Today, I need to go for a swim with my coaches, check in for the race, and go to a meeting tonight for the race. I expect a lot of lounging around today as well. I'll probably get all of my gear out and ready to go as well. I actually have quite a lot of stuff to do and that isn't great because I also need to be doing a lot of nothing and sleeping, too. Speaking of, I actually slept last night as opposed to the previous 2 nights.

Well, time to go for a swim.