Bienvenidos a Miami

So here’s the rest of the weekend…

Paula and I left for Miami around 10:30 on Saturday morning. I showed up with an iced latte and demanded she get into my car. It worked.

The drive was pretty uneventful – minus our trip to Subway where I got REALLY pissy about bread.

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I am not a fun person when I am hungry.

We got into Miami without a hitch (no Will Smith movie pun intended) (although dude, the traffic is scary there. I thought Orlando was bad!) and met Melissa in the lobby. The one really fun part about meeting bloggers in real life is that there’s no awkward phase. We basically went from “Hi so nice to meet you!” to “Let’s talk about things you only tell your closest friends.” in about 20 minutes.

After checking out the view from hotel room (we stayed at the Hyatt Regency Miami)…

We headed out to find the shuttle to the expo. Within about 2 minutes we picked up a guy (score!) who said he had a girlfriend (boo — for Melissa) and he showed us the way to the shuttle pick up. Once again shuttle = school bus. So fanci.

We got to the expo around 4 and it was STILL crazy.

And picked up our bibs, gels, Clif Bars (seriously in LOVE with the coconut chocolate chip!), and socks (I couldn’t find a matching pair of Thorlos before I left. I can’t race without them). We were going to walk around, but booths were shutting down and we didn’t want to have to wait 9 hours for the “shuttle.” So we headed back to the hotel to prep for dinner.

3 girls. 1 bathroom. 1 mirror. Seriously – 1 mirror. WTF Hyatt?

Melissa decided against rocking “The Beast just got his hair done” look. Probably a good thing.

We didn’t go far for dinner – we decided to eat at the hotel. Apparently we weren’t alone because we had to wait – and get a drink. My arm was twisted. OK – maybe that was always part of the plan.

Nothing wrong with a pre-race dirty martini, right (stolen from Melissa)?

Taken as my name was called…or I was dancing on the inside.

For dinner we all went with “Latin” buffet — and I stuffed my face with yuca, plantains, rice, guacamole, chips, Cuban salad, and tortilla soup.   They also brought us some meat (the waiter actually said, “I have some meat for you ladies.”) – but it was NASTY. I’ll spare you pictures. The rest of the food was good though.

There were also cookies for dessert, which I wish I could say I pigged out on, but I was too full. Lame.

We shuffled back to the hotel room, got our crap ready, and then snuggled in bed with our pillow. We named him Menoj after our waiter.

This is totally normal, right? We might have been delirious.

Then Sunday we raced. Melissa posed with bananas.

And as we know – Paula got up and personal with this fine piece of  art. (we didn’t look to see what was on the other side)

And then it was time to go. We showered and said our goodbyes around noon. Paula and I headed to Sweet Tomatoes where we stuffed our faces off.  Again. We should NOT be allowed to go to buffets together.

We then caffeinated heavily and headed back to Jamlando where smiling faces and big hearts awaited me.

What a whirlwind crazy weekend full of good friends, running, and food. Can you ask for anything more?