Catching up!

I have been chastised for not keeping my blog up to date. So now that I know people are actually reading this thing, I promise to be more diligent! The last two weeks I spent in Spain and Switzerland for work. It was my first trip to both countries and I was not disappointed!

Spain:
We were in Palma on the island of Mallorca. I bet this would be a nice place for vacation, but was tough for work. All I wanted to do was go to the beach, unfortunately I had to go to the congress each day, and stare longingly out the door at the blue, sunny sky! We managed to squeeze in a few hours of shopping on our last afternoon, always good fun.

In Palma no one goes to dinner before 10 and everyone stays out until all hours. The morning starts a bit later and you are supposed to have a siesta in the afternoon before heading to dinner late and starting all over again. This was a bit hard to do when you had to be in a booth in the morning, but the last night as we were heading into a travel day; Brenda and I decided to check out the local scene! We rested in the afternoon and headed to the restaurant about 10:30pm. After a leisurely and delicious dinner we headed to Titos, the local disco. The place was great, spacious, hopping with people dancing, and they played great music! The majority of the crowd was a bit younger then us, but we had a blast dancing the night away. We even met a nice group of guys from Sweden who were there as a reward for top sales. We didn’t leave until just after 5am and there were still people lined up to come in!!! They really know how to party in Spain.

As for training, I was very diligent and ran every morning for an hour. And two of the days I swam as well since our hotel had a pool. I took our travel day to Switzerland as my “rest day”, since I was also recovering from a very late night and lots of dancing!

Wed 6/7 – Swim 45 min
Thurs – Run 1 hr (I think about 6 miles)
Fri – Run 1 hr (6.5 miles, faster pace) and swim 30 min
Sat – Run 1 hr (6 miles)

Switzerland:
I was looking forward to the train ride from Zurich to Bern, unfortunately I slept through the whole thing! But I needed it. We arrived in Bern on Sun, late afternoon. Had just enough time for a snack and then it was straight to the cocktail reception for our meeting. Got to catch up with some of our international customers and got some good suggestions for things to do in Switzerland. Then it was full force into the meeting for the next two days. Tues night after the meeting ended our distributor from Poland (Tomas) took Brenda, Jeff, and our Polish customer to the charming little town of Murten. It was entirely surrounded by a wall, sat on the lake, and if there were not cars parked on the street, looks exactly as it did hundreds of years ago. It was lovely! I loved Bern as well, such a beautiful city and we had a great time catching up with all of our international friends at IPFA. But Wed afternoon it was finally time to stop working and start playing! Brenda and I headed out on a train to Geneva. This part I stayed awake for! It was lovely, the green rolling hills passing by, the view as we came upon lake Geneva and the small towns that dot the countryside. It was definitely one of the highlights of the trip. Then we arrived in Geneva itself, so different from Bern. Geneva is more modern, bustling with people, mostly business people. I loved seeing them in their suits riding bikes across town, off to work in one of the tall office buildings! We spent that afternoon and all the next day wandering the narrow streets, enjoying the architecture, quaint spots, and shopping (lots of shopping)! Both nights we had great meals and the service was incredible. Everywhere we went in Switzerland the people were so friendly and helpful, it made the whole trip such a great experience. Thurs night we had a lovely dinner "al fresca" and celebrated Brenda’s birthday. It was great fun and they brought us this enormous “meringue” dessert! All in all a great time, I would love to go back to Switzerland for a real vacation.

Again I kept up my training, even getting lots of people to run with me in Bern. One morning we had 6 of us out there, running through town and down along the river. It was pretty and quiet; we really had a lot of fun. The hotel in Geneva had a really nice pool too, so I swam both days there.

Mon 6/12 – Run 5.8 miles (very accurate given Jeff’s GPS watch)
Tues – Run 4.5 miles, fairly hard (trying to keep up with Sandy who is faster than me)
Wed – Swim 45 min
Thurs – Run 1 hour (probably about 6 miles), swim 35 minFri – Run easy 30 min after I got home, just to stretch my legs out