Changes in Latitudes

Last weekend (the first weekend of September), Marius and I were invited to join REN (Marius' old employer) on their annual trip. Previous trips that we were both included in were St. Petersburg, Paris, and Rome. This year was Budapest, and it happened about a week after the refugees and migrants made their way into Hungary. It was definitely adding a different perspective to the trip while we stayed in a 5-star hotel and ate a 5-course dinner. Pancho spent the weekend with one of my colleagues who also has a dog. It isn't too hard to find puppy-sitters right now since I work with animal lovers. And who doesn't love puppies? So Marius and I got in on Friday night and took a cab to the hotel with another couple on the trip. The European Cup soccer qualifier was that night, so our driver tried to go around the soccer hooligans and the possible chaos at the train station, but it was pretty quiet. We ended up driving by the train station a couple of times, but it wasn...

March 29th was the half-marathon in Madrid that I got from Marius for Christmas. It was my fourth half-marathon and I trained a solid 15 weeks to earn a new personal record. Prior to this race, my personal record was 1:47, set in Lisbon in March 2013...I was around 30 seconds shy last year when I ran in Bergen coming in at 1:48 - I forgot the exact seconds. We had a few days in Madrid before the race, but I will write about those later when I can get the pictures from Marius' camera. The course looped the northern part of the city and finished in a very nice park. There were nearly 17,000 runners, and I definitely blended in with the crowd. Marius was much easier to spot with his blond hair. Even though I wore my American flag shorts, there were so many people that it would have been difficult for Marius to spot me through the crowd. So I encouraged him to do his workout and keep an eye out for me at 10:45am.  The course was not flat, like I had thought it would be. Rathe...

Marius' former boss invited us to join the REN trip to Rome (May 9-12). Marius went on Wednesday morning with his former colleagues and a couple of other companies. The first few days were spent in meetings for them. I arrived Friday night. I wasn't sure when exactly I would get there because the winds were too strong in Amsterdam - the famous windmills must have been making lots of power. Some of the other significant others from REN and I arrived to Rome around 9pm. We stayed at a hotel within eye-shot of the Colosseum, it was pretty darn cool. Of course the first night in town we had an authentic Italian multi-course dinner: cooked mixed veggies, pizza, pasta, cheeses, pizza and tiramisu. Yum! Saturday morning we had a three-hour group walking tour from the Colosseum, past the Roman Forum, Pantheon and finishing up at Piazza Navona. Basically the bigger tourist attractions on the east side of the river. Naturally, REN had a fancy 5-star lunch planned and Marius and I had...