Last year, we all bundled up and still froze on Friday afternoon/evening. But then we were unprepared for the sun and heat on Saturday, and all of the kids got sunburned. So this year we went with both blankets AND sunblock!
Ryan also loves the long course (summer) swim season, because his older high school swim buddies swim with the team.
On Friday, Ryan swam the 50 butterfly (1st place in his heat; beat his own time). His best friend, James, was in the lane next to him.
And the 400 IM (2nd place in his age group; beat his own time). So few swimmers swam this event (Michael Phelps even says this is an event he doesn’t like to do), all of the swimmers were in one heat. So, Ryan was able to swim with two of his older buddies – Thomas S. (16) and Drew B. (14).
We went to our favorite “carb loading” spot for dinner – Pizza Pie Café. For $8 per person, it’s all you can eat salad bar, pizza (about 15 different kinds!), pasta (about 8 different types of pasta and 6 different sauces), and dessert pizza (about 10 different kinds!). We all love it, since some of us can have more salad than other things, and some of us can have as much cheese pizza as he wants. :)
On Saturday, Ryan swam the 50 breaststroke. Seven out of the 8 lanes in the final heat (the best swimmers) were Ryan’s best friends from the team. It was so much fun to see all of them lined up together in that final heat! I know they are so tiny in the picture, but I wanted the whole line-up. (L to R: Austin C., Ryan, James W., a kid from CUDA, Joshua B., Nathan S., Austin I., Jordan I.)
And the 50 backstroke. Five out of the 8 lanes in the final heat were Ryan’s best friends from the team, and an additional lane was his friend, Payson, from the Clearfield team. Again, it was so much fun to see all of our favorite 11 & 12 year old swimmers lined up together in that fastest heat! (This picture: Ryan, Jared K., Payson C.) Notice the people behind them all bundled up. BRRR!!!
We didn’t wait around for the preliminary results to post, so I’m not sure how he did. This pool does not have a board showing all of the placing and times, so we never know for sure until the results are posted on the USA Swimming website. (Here Ryan was double checking the posted results as we were leaving.)
After Ryan’s events, we went to another one of our favorite stops – the Gossner factory store. My favorite is the mango milk, Ryan’s favorite is the cookies & cream milk. We also always buy feta cheese and squeaky cheese, and see what else is there. How much we buy depends on when we’ll be there again. Since we’ll be back through in July, we actually had our lowest bill EVER!
After Gossner’s, we headed north to Richmond to the Pepperidge Farm factory store. After all, we needed crackers to go with our cheese and cookies to go with our milk! If you’ve never been, the entire store is about the size of our kitchen & living room, with about 50 people packed in! But they have every Pepperidge Farm item you can think of, as well as some you may never have seen before! Ryan stocked up on the ginormous Goldfish tubs (30 oz. for $4). I bought a couple of boxes of crackers that I have never seen before, along with Milano and Tahiti cookies (interestingly also representing two of my favorite places on earth – Italy and the South Pacific).
Each stop on our “Tour of Utah: Swimming Pool Edition,” we try to find local restaurants, too. In Richmond, we stopped at Big J’s for lunch. The owner was so nice and fun to talk with! He gave us the history of the restaurant, and even told us that the restaurant scenes from “Napoleon Dynamite” (one of our favorite shows) were filmed there! He directed us to one wall, full of memorabilia and pictures from the movie. So fun!
No comments:
Post a Comment