The Biggest Weekend

This past weekend was the biggest weekend in the entire 3-Day 24 week training program. This was the weekend of the 18 and 15 miles back-to-back training walks--a weekend so big that there's even a special milestone sticker to commemorate it! These big walks are actually scheduled for this coming weekend, but since I have the KU homecoming game and a wedding to go to on Saturday, I knew there'd be no time for walking 18 miles!

So Mom and I swapped last weekend with this weekend, and took on the big one right after our grueling 17 mile walk last weekend. I wasn't so worried about the 18 on Saturday--I knew Mom would handle that just fine--but I was definitely worried about the subsequent 15 on Sunday. Mom has struggled a bit on the long Sunday walks, so I encouraged her to stay the night so that I could help motivate her the next day.

For a new and different place to walk on Saturday, Mom and I drove to the little town of Baldwin City, which is just about 20 minutes south of Lawrence. It took a while to get there because of fog, but we arrived at about 8:15, just before the town came alive for the annual Maple Leaf Festival. It was still really chilly outside, so we layered up and started walking around the town, coming back to the car every few miles for drinks and snacks. For our first pit stop we went to Kwik Shop, where we had to wait for at least 20 minutes to use the restroom because the place was so crowded with tourists!

Instead of going downtown for the parade, we decided to go against the foot traffic to head out to the edge of town, where we saw the old train depot and the antique train to nowhere. As we headed back towards the festival we stopped for a quick stretch, and we'd already knocked off 6-7 miles. Our goal was to walk 14 in Baldwin before heading back to Lawrence.

After walking around some residential areas and seeing the train we moved into the downtown, where we milled about the hundreds of booths of crafts and art. We walked through the old-fashioned carnival area and actually stopped at the petting zoo and petted some farm and exotic animals for a while too. It was all very entertaining! We walked around the Baker University campus for the first time--it was really pretty! After taking in the sights and dodging the crowds for a while, we headed towards the north end of town and walked around some really nice neighborhoods there and walked around the high school.

After one last trip back to the car, we headed back down to the festival and bought a few items that we'd seen in our first walk through. We would have gotten finished a lot sooner had we not spent so much time milling about the festival and dropping by local shops! We were still able to finish our 14 miles by about 2:30, at which point we headed back to Lawrence to watch the KU/OU game.

Mom did a lot of napping during the game, and after it was over (a mere 4 hours later) we headed back out for our last 4 miles. We took the dogs along this time, which always takes longer for all the sniffing and squatting and leg-lifting, but we managed to finish the day by about 8:30 or so. Mom didn't get tired necessarily, but she did have some weakness and lightheadedness that we think was probably due to minor dehydration. We didn't wear our fanny-packs around the festival during the day so we probably didn't drink nearly as much as we needed to!

Since our 18 mile walk took so much time to talk about, I'll save the 15 mile story for tomorrow!