The Life of Pizza John

We arrived in Key Biscayne on Saturday and checked into our hotel (Silver Sands).  It was super budget for the area ($169/night), but it was a great location and worked well for us.  Before riding the course, we checked in at the bike store and this was when the unorganization started.  There was no rhyme or reason to how they were helping people and it took forever to get our race packets.  It would have been ok if there were a lot of people in the store, but there were only 4 of us. Once that was done, we headed to check out the bike course. The course was not marked yet so we just rode most of the trails to get the feel for them.  It was fun and I'm glad we got to check them out to adjust tire pressure and get use to the turns. The morning of the race, they were setting up the buoys as we were heading over to the swim start.  They said it was wetsuit legal, but I didn't feel like the water was cold enough so I didn't wear one.  There was a litt...

Who though surfing a Disney wave pool could be so much fun?!?  We planned on surfing at 6:45am on a Saturday, but it was too cold for the park to open so we got to meet at 9am instead.  There were 7 surfers and a couple people to take pictures.  Daria was one of the photographer so she took all the pictures below except the last one (and the one with her in the group). With each session, you get 100 waves and you can split them into groups of 25.  You can choose from Right, Left or A-Frame.  We decided to start with 25 A-Frame waves since we wanted to get more people in the water to get use to the wave.  The A-Frame is definitely more steep than the Rights and Lefts which was fun, but you get a shorter ride.  We did Rights for the second set, Lefts for the third and A-Frame again for the last set.  Next time it would be nice to only go with 4 people so everyone could just stay in the water instead of walking around and waiting in line.  We...

Instead of buying a bunch of crap for Christmas, I decided to take Daria on a cruise.  I figured it would be something she remembers later down the line.  It was a short 3 night cruise from Cape Canaveral to Nassau and back. Daria had a blast!  On the ship we played games, ate too much food and watched some live shows.  When in Nassau, we snorkeled with Stuart Cove and had a great time.  The last of the three snorkel spots, they fed sharks below us and we got to be in the water with them.  Daria was the first one in the water and thought it was amazing!  I think I'll start doing trips for Christmas instead of 'things', since I thought this was a success!

Goodbye 2013, you have been good to me!  I hope 2014 can live up to you.  I traveled more than I could have imagined including places like the Maldives, Qatar, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Hawaii, Mexico and more! I'm not sure if I can top that list this year, but I have some good trips in the works. One of my main goals was to simplify more and buy less junk and I definitely accomplished this.  To keep me in check, some of my goals for this year are... Yoga --Press to Handstand --Scorpion in either Tiger or Handstand --Head to knee in Rabbit --Flat Stretching Work --Keep doing well at my job Triathlon --First place in a local event Other: --Fluent enough in Spanish to really communicate and get around --Read at least 12 books I have some other goals, but I'll keep them to myself :-) I'm looking forward to a great Triathlon season and some fun races.  I am already so excited about this year!!! Here are some pictures from this year that never got posted... ...

Little did we know that El Salvador is a great place to travel in November.  The weather was great, it didn't rain and not a lot of people are traveling so it as super easy to find places to stay.  Here is a rundown of what we did along the way. We flew into the San Salvador airport which is far from most towns so we had to take a cab to the coast for $30.  We made a hotel arrangement for the first night since we didn't get in till after 2am.  The rest of the trip we just figured out along the way. Costa Del Sol We spent the first night here at the Pacific Paradise hotel. It was right on the beach and nicely landscaped.  We ate their delicious local breakfast, then enjoyed the beach for a bit.  We didn't spend much time here since we wanted to start exploring so we grabbed a bus to La Libertad in the early afternoon.  We really enjoyed traveling on their buses. Each one was decorated differently, some played music, and people were always hoppi...