Nashville Race Recap Part 2 (Friday)

We decided to sleep in on Friday, well everyone except Gary he is up at 3:30am every morning!!! I think it was a little after 8:00 when we all started waking up and moving around. We headed downstairs to indulge in the complimentary breakfast buffet. It was ok, nothing special but it was nice. Gary had already been up for hours and again had been socializing with the Hotel Staff. We headed back to our room, we took turns showering and I think both Arland and Robert ended up using Gary's room.
When we went outside to find Gary, there he was washing my car!! I have a picture but I can't post it from work. It was just too funny for words and how sweet of him to do that for me!!!!

We decided to go ahead and head to the Expo, we drove but really it probably would have been easier to walk, traffic and parking was a mess!!! When we went to Chicago we went to the Expo on Friday and missed a lot of the crowds, well we made up for it in Nashville. It was PACKED!!!! We got all of our stuff and then just started wandering around. Luckily we all had phones so it was fairly easy to keep up with everyone. I was really good and didn't buy anything... well until later when I bought a new Sugoi running top. I think we had been there for a couple of hours when Brenda called to let us know they had made it to the Hotel. The first plan was we would go back to the Hotel and meet them... then we decided they would come to the Convention Center we would meet and go get lunch. Everyone was starved and I was starting to get a little clausterphobic from the crowds. It took a little work to get everyone rounded up and then find the girls. We headed to Panera Bread which was right across the street but it was packed so we walked down Broadway and found a place called "Bailey's Bar & Grill" we thought perfect!!! Anything with the name Bailey had to be good... right???? Well not exactly, it took well over an hour for us to get our food and it was freezing in there, but as usual we made the best of it and were pretty much just happy to be sitting down. After lunch we headed back to the Expo and spent a couple more hours there, we also met with the pace group leaders. Finally we were all pretty exhausted and headed back to the Hotel. When we went to the Expo in Chicago we went 2 days before the Race and although it was busy it was easy to get around and see everything, Nashville the day before the race is a madhouse!!! Next year we are going on Thursday!

Several of us needed to go to Wal-Mart or at least a grocery store so Robert drove Gary, Michele, Kelly and I to the local Wal-Mart Neighborhood Market. We didn't stay long got what we needed and headed back to the Hotel.
We decided we would go back to the Gerst Haus for a light dinner. We love that place!!!! Our waitress Shelly was great and took special care of us, even bringing us a round of pickle juice shots. Gary always has pickle juice during a long race, it is supposed to help with cramps, we all decided we had to have some as well. I LOVE pickles so I knew i would like it but most everyone else was suprised that they liked it as much as they did. Shelly of course thought we were all crazy!! LOL

We were anxious to get back to the Hotel and try to get to bed at a decent time. We had orginally planned to be in bed by 8:30 but we were still walking back to the hotel at that time. It was a much quieter walk back this time compared to Thursday night when we were all howling with laughter the whole time, but we were still pretty lively talking about the next day.

Once back in the room we finished our race preperations, putting chips on shoes, pinning race numbers on shirts, etc. I think we finally had lights out at about 9:30.