Yay Redlands!

O.K.

I just finished a really hard stage race! AND I finished in not-worst place! The team finished in 9th place overall, right up there for qualifying for a travel grant for the Bermuda Grand Prix at the end of the year.

This was a really great race, one of my favourites. The courses were demanding and rewarding, the competition was top-notch, and our host family was absolutely amazing. So amazing that Sharon and I were like "oh, we'll just stay in Redlands for another night and drive home tomorrow, since it will be better for recovery and everything..."

Good thing we didn't hit the road tonight, today's stage was super hard (all warnings about the full-gas uphill "neutral" roll-out proved valid) and I am giddily wasted.

Anyway, the highlights:

-Jill McLaughlin, who we borrowed from Touchstone, is so great! She somehow is still friends with me even though I had to ask her to repeat herself like 200 times - she has lived in the U.S. for 13 years after moving here from England so I seriously doubt her accent is that thick, I am just getting old-and-hard-of-hearing I guess! Sigh. The funniest was when she kept asking me "Am I all salty?" after the Oak Glen stage on Friday. I kept hearing "am I assaulting?" and I was like "who? what? you assaulted who? was he cute? what HAPPened?! tell me tell me tell me!" Anyway...

-An anonymous teammate gets up and drinks a Diet Coke first thing in the morning, which apparently gets her going enough to make and drink her coffee.

-Sharon and I are sharing a bed during this trip and last night she thought I was her dog and she reached over to pet me-who-she-thought-was-Buster but instead she poked me in the eye. I was knocked out with Ambien so I didn't even notice but she apologized this morning, which is how I found out about it. Hmph.

-Sharon also thinks that my pony Pox is a purple unicorn. What do you think?: