When we got to the hotel I nervously knocked on our hotel door. No reply. I knocked louder. No reply. Uh-oh! I turned around and that was when I first saw my room mate, Susie. She was walking up to the group after grabbing a bite to eat. We went into our room for a little while and had some small talk. She watched as I obsessively unpacked everything and "organized" it, then we headed over to another hotel room to get our sparkle skirts (these uber awesome sequin skirts a board member had made for us) and chit chat. We ended up having such a great time chatting that we didn't leave until 1:30! Crazy, but we all clicked. It was like the online and the in real life were one and the same. Susie and I headed to bed to be rested for our breakfast reservations.
Here's my towel Mickey waiting for me on the bed, along with my magic band and a note from my roomie. I'd obviously moved the note, since we weren't in the invisible ink stage at that time
Our sparkle skirts and our memorial tee (another generous gift from a Cove member)
The next morning was breakfast at the Grand Floridian. Wow, was their food delish! I haven't ever eaten there besides the Princess dinner and that's pretty much a buffet.Well not pretty much, it is a buffet. The breakfast though, wow!!
Jeanna gamely smiling through the 30 or so photos I took trying to do a panorama
The best one I got. And my room mate was NOT Jay Leno's sister. That's all my photo skills people!
After breakfast we took a bus to the ESPN place, zone, hub, whatever, I'm not *that* into sports to pick up our race bibs and swag. This was the start of many inside jokes, including the phone convo where "creepy boyfriend" was introduced. If I explain it to you, it won't be funny, but if you were there, hilarious.
We picked up our race bibs and walked around the expo. Most of the women in the group were just planning on the 5K, but a few of us decided to do the half as well. Lucky for me my roommate was one of them! We could travel to the race together. We quickly pulled Julie, another half runner into our happy little band.
Julie and I with our 5K bibs
Me, Belle (that's her in the yellow dress, in case you're not on a first name basis ;) ), Julie & Susie with our half bibs. There were some pretty great whole group photos too but I didn't capture any on my cameras.
After the expo it was back to the hotel to clean up and get ready for dinner at Kona in the Polynesian. They have macadamia nut butter people. Enough said! There were so many special and kind women on this trip. Here's Laurie with her basket of goodies that she made for each and every one of us. We also got the chance to eat with Holly's family members.
After dinner we went down to the Poly beach and had our memorial service for Holly. Words were shared, tears flowed, and as we concluded fireworks from the Magic Kingdom burst in the sky behind us. Pretty amazing all in all.
The next day was going to be an early morning with us needing to be on the race busses by 4, I believe? At that time I pretty much just did whatever people told me to, and after the trip I was so wiped I don't remember all the details. So we turned in to get a couple of hours of sleep.
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