Providence Part 1

 

Happy hump day! I am finally getting back into a routine after being out of town. Yesterday I ran 2 miles, went grocery shopping, and did some catching up on work. Today I am going to work out again, clean the house, and catch up on even more work.

I know I did a couple of quick posts when I was in Providence, but now that I am home I can go into more detail about my awesome trip, so I apologize if there are a couple of pictures in here I have already posted. Here we go!

Wednesday morning my dad brought me to the airport for my 7 am flight. It was quick and smooth, and I landed in Philadelphia. No offense to anyone who lives there, but the airport there kind of creeped me out! I didn’t feel entirely safe, so I stayed put in my terminal. And ate a pretzel. with cheese.

My plane going to Rhode Island was on time, so off we went, and I landed at 3 pm. I hit up starbucks after I got my luggage, and set up my laptop. Michelle wasn’t getting in till 6, so I had three hours. They actually went by fast, I enjoy people watching and of course drinking coffee, so I didn’t mind.

 

Michelle arrived right on time and I was so excited to see her! I had a blast meeting her in June so I knew we would have a great time.  We caught the airport shuttle to our hotel, the Westin, which was connected to the convention center where the expo was held.

 

After we got settled, we decided to head to the mall connected to the hotel and pick up some things we needed for the expo, and get some dinner. There was a skywalk going across to the mall from the hotel.

We ended up at Panera bread inside an amazingly nice mall. (They had a Tiffanys, with armed guards!) We wandered around for awhile then headed back to Bed Bath and Beyond. We were so tired and delirious everything was funny. (Does this happen to anyone else?) Including trying to get the bins onto a shopping cart….which didn’t work! They kept sliding off, and they all wouldn’t fit, and we were making quite a scene.

The store was nice enough to send an employee back to the hotel with us so we wouldn’t have to make 5 trips to get the bins. I think they thought we had lost our minds we were laughing so much!

We went to bed soon after, knowing the next day was a big one!

Thursday morning we got up and headed to the front desk to get all of our boxes out of their storage and get them to the convention center. But first we had to get a cab and go pick up our gridwall from a business supply store. After driving around and not being able to find the store, we finally got the gridwall and were dropped off at the loading dock of the convention center (we couldn’t find that at first either. Some people shouldn’t be allowed to give directions.)

EEEKK!!! Yay! my first Rock N Roll sinage sighting! We got our badges and info, and found our booth. Not that many people were setting up yet, it was so interesting to me to see the expo before it was all set up and full of people!

but we finally got everything into our booth after a couple hours!

We had a lot of work to do, but we are both hard workers and got it done as quick as we could. It was nice having all day, so we didn’t have to rush.

we were done by about 5:00, doesn’t it look great?!

That night we went to dinner at some place called Uno’s, it was pretty good. I had some pasta if I remember correctly.

That evening we hit up the hot tub. Our legs were starting to hurt from working all day, and knowing we still had 2 days of this before the race, I knew were were going to be hurting by Saturday night!

Up next…The Expo starts!

QOTD: What is your favorite thing about race expos?

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