what a weekend

heath and i were super busy last weekend.

friday night, we headed up toward ravinia to see john hiatt. my friend lives near there, so we were able to park in her driveway. as we chatted a bit, it started pouring. she offered to let us in for a bit, to wait out the rain (outdoor concert and all), where her daughter offered us a lovely tour of their house. the rain did not want to quit, so we got invited for dinner - homemade risotto and margaritas. so delicious! after dinner, it cleared up a bit, so we wandered over to the show. it was damp and drizzled a bit more, but it was a lot of fun and john hiatt is SO good live! heath even bought me a cute little ravinia teddy bear.

saturday we woke up to rain so we pretty much did rainy day stuff - cleaning, organizing, lounging. once it cleared up a bit, we headed over to heath's friend's house to pick them up for our kayaking adventure. no rain, but we did get plenty wet under the big hose across the river. the fireworks were cool, but it was really tiring (6ish miles!), especially since none of us had ever kayaked before! we stayed at their house for a bit afterwards and got some pizza - even dominoes tasted good - that's how hungry we were. then it started to really pour and we took off.

we slept in sunday since we didn't get home until about 2am. that messes up your day. then we wandered down to watch the evanston northwestern healthcare grand prix of cycling. really. really. cool. it's a criterium, which is a very exciting, technical type of race to watch. those people have to be concentrating like mad the WHOLE time. we, unfortunately, saw a number of crashes. the worst were the two people (a girl during the women's cat 3 & 4 race, and a guy during the men's pro's) that had to be taken out in ambulances. they were both conscious but their heads were bleeding. yikes. the most dramatic crash was at the finishing sprint of the men's cat 3 race. some guys toward the front crashed somehow about 20 feet from the finish line. because of the speed and the tight pack, like 12 guys went down. bike parts and water bottles were flying everywhere. one guy stood up after crashing and got hit by another cyclist. nobody was too seriously hurt, but it was insane to see that crazy of a crash that close up - we were standing on the side right by the finish line so i saw the whole thing. a few trashed bikes, too. *weep*

the race is a pretty big deal and the guy that won the men's pros is a two time olympic champion. the announcer was great, but wasn't who i thought he was (confused myself with the whole belgian thing... i'll need to go see breaking away now). the guy that won the "sprint" jersey, was crazy good - he was very exciting to watch because he would pull these moves off and leap out in front at the last second somehow -- totally mind blowing. going and watching races like that make me both scared to death to try and curious to see if i could do it. one of the scariest things was when we were standing at one corner of the course and heath was taking pics as the guys came around the turn. if any of those guys missed the turn, they would have come straight into us - it was pretty freaky. that was the corner that both the people that went to the hospital crashed on. we weren't standing there when they crashed, but tight turns at high speeds are scary scary stuff. these guys were going somewhere around 30 mph, getting up to 35 on the sprint straightaways. to put that in perspective, in my races, i'm usually about 18 mph. the girls averaged between 20 and 25. maybe someday i'll be that fast. well, if i decide to go train.