{"id":51,"date":"2008-05-21T21:49:35","date_gmt":"2008-05-21T20:49:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/uhlfelder.com\/blog\/?p=51"},"modified":"2008-05-29T21:22:31","modified_gmt":"2008-05-29T20:22:31","slug":"week-40-may-21-to-may-27","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/uhlfelder.com\/?p=51","title":{"rendered":"Week 40 — May 21 to May 27"},"content":{"rendered":"

May 21, 2008<\/u>.\u00a0 Today was our 14th wedding anniversary.\u00a0 It’s been an above-average 14 years, for sure.\u00a0 Anywho, we decided to go to see the Volta a Catalunya, the second biggest bike race in Spain.\u00a0 About an hour and a quarter drive north, we went to Banyoles<\/a>, a cute town near Gerona, famous for Lance Armstrong’s winter training home.\u00a0\u00a0 We walked around a bit, then watched the start<\/a>.\u00a0 We quickly got in the car, then quickly zipped to the start of the mountains and were stopped by police.\u00a0 They let us go to a parking area up the road, we parked and walked up the road to watch <\/a>as they hit the mountains.\u00a0 We managed to collect a bunch of water bottles, since we were the only people watching the race.\u00a0 After the four seconds of watching the guys pass us on their bikes, then watching about 100 cars racing up the road, we followed and picked up a bunch of water bottles discarded by the riders.\u00a0 There some marked with codes, like DL which we believe is “dope laden” or something.\u00a0<\/p>\n

I drank a bit and I feel wide awake and haven’t slept in 48 hours, not to mention I just went out and ran a 10K in 33 minutes, my fastest time ever (just kidding).\u00a0\u00a0 On the way back we went through a bunch of cute towns and countryside, including Sant Joan de Les Abadessas full of old stuff<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

One thing about these small Spanish towns is they are full of Arabs and Africans who apparently have made little effort to integrate into the towns or haven’t been accepted.\u00a0 This is\u00a0anathema to us Americans, well somewhat, since we are all immigrants (insert usual melting pot BS speech here).\u00a0 In any case, these immigrants are there and in their own worlds which work as a parallel world to the Catalan and worlds.\u00a0\u00a0 In a similar but more ugly vain, everyone here speaks about the gypsies who are being attacked in Italy and loathed more or less throughout Europe.\u00a0 They are basically considered bands of roaving thieves.\u00a0<\/p>\n

May 22, 2008<\/u>.\u00a0 We ran out of water and soap, so I was dehydrated and dirty until we got our delivery today from El Corte Ingles, which is a department store that delivers.\u00a0 Huge improvement, or so Anne claims.\u00a0<\/p>\n

May 23, 2008<\/u>.\u00a0 I went on a 3.5 hour bike ride to try to find a good path to put some mileage in since next week I am host to Nick, my bike-riding friend from London.\u00a0 We’ll ride one day here, then go to Girona and ride for three more days, trying to get some mileage in and see just how many miles we are willing to endure.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Tonight was International Night at the kids’ school.\u00a0 It was a really fun party, with tables for every country represented.\u00a0 There was a lot(!) of food, and a pity that it was all clearly tossed.\u00a0 I manned the BBQ which was too hot since I got there late and the guy who said he’d get it started didn’t know what he was doing.\u00a0 Anyway, we cooked about 150 hot dogs which were really gross.\u00a0 There was Indian food (nice and spicy), South African food (interesting, and different but similar to Indian), German (saurcraut and gummy bears), Japanese (suchi), American (hot dogs and brownies (yum), English (mainly deserts that were multi-colored), Brazilian (caparinias), and more.\u00a0 I had some nice conversations with some of the others to see if they are staying and leaving and their plans.\u00a0<\/p>\n

May 24, 2008<\/u>.\u00a0 It was very rainy this morning — this has been the most rain they have had in May since 1957 according to the La Vanguardia.\u00a0 It stopped by afternoon which was good, then\u00a0Joshua had a birthday party where all the kids were taken to the new Indiana Jones movie, and Anne, David and I tagged along.\u00a0 The movie was okay, but not much more.<\/p>\n

May 25, 2008<\/u>.\u00a0 It’s raining again this morning.\u00a0 Anne went through Joshua’s backpack and found another letter from the school warning that someone had head lice.\u00a0 These letters come home every so often and make us think the kids have head lice.\u00a0 Nice.\u00a0 Turns out they did!\u00a0One live one\u00a0on Joshua but lots of eggs on both of them.\u00a0 We did\u00a0tons of combing with the special metal comb and tons of laundry, a multi-step lotion and shampoo process, and a stuffed animal quarentine.\u00a0 And of course, emails to their teachers to spread the news.<\/p>\n

May 26, 2008<\/u>.\u00a0 Joshua had his physical fitness challenge this morning — the running part.\u00a0 He already set the school recond in pull ups — 11 (he tied with a fourth grader).\u00a0 I went but didn’t end up helping since there were so many parents.\u00a0 I ended up talking with a very kind and nice German woman and a nice American guy who is married to a very harsh and cold Dutch woman.\u00a0<\/p>\n

May 27, 2008<\/u>.\u00a0 I got in contact with my friend from the UK about our upcoming bike trip since the weather pattern doesn’t look bike-friendly, namely rain, heavy at times.\u00a0 Since neither of us like to ride in the rain (who does) and there are some pretty difficult and technical descents on these rides, we called the trip off.\u00a0 Darn\u00a0— I\u00a0was looking forward to it.\u00a0 In any case, I went out for a ride between rain showers, got lucky, and managed to ride about 1:40 or so.\u00a0 Very hard riding with some locals both going one way and then the other.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

May 21, 2008.\u00a0 Today was our 14th wedding anniversary.\u00a0 It’s been an above-average 14 years, for sure.\u00a0 Anywho, we decided to go to see the Volta a Catalunya, the second biggest bike race in Spain.\u00a0 About an hour and a quarter drive north, we went to Banyoles, a cute town near Gerona, famous for Lance […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-51","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uhlfelder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uhlfelder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uhlfelder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uhlfelder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uhlfelder.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=51"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/uhlfelder.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uhlfelder.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=51"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uhlfelder.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=51"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uhlfelder.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=51"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}