The St. George scenery gets us every time. The red rocks are incredible and the race course takes us through several different towns, allowing us to see so much of the area. With such a challenging course (hills, heat and wind), the spectacular views make it easy to temporarily forget about the suffering.
For the first time ever, the Ironman World Championship is taking place outside of Hawaii. On May 7th, Karel and I will be participating in the 2021 Ironman World Championship (because no World Championship took place last year, this race is being called the 2021 World Championship). This will be my 6th Ironman World Championship and 18th Ironman event. This will be Karel's 5th Ironman World Championship and 15th Ironman event. We love tough and challenging events and we will be tested on Saturday.
Our travel started off super early on Monday morning. We woke up around 3:30am, quickly got ourselves ready, said good-bye to our five furry kids (who will be well taken care of while we are away) and drove to the Greenville airport. Due to our small airport, we rarely need more than 90-minutes to go from parking to the plane. Well, this time was different. The airport was packed at 4:15am! With a 5:30am departure to Atlanta, we were cutting it close and then at security, Karel was told that his birthdate didn't match his ticket because the lady at the counter entered it wrong. So he had to sprint back to the counter to get it changed. By the time he got through security and then we got to the gate, the door was shut and we - along with a handful of others - were not on our plane.
In all my years of traveling, I've never missed a flight before. It was our fault for not allowing more time. I was so upset. This trip was not starting off on a good note. We were put on the next flight (7am) and on a different flight from Atlanta to Vegas so thankfully we got to our final destination on the same day (just a few hours later than planned).
Things turned from bad to good when we picked up our rental car. This was my first time using Turo and it was awesome. We went from the luggage area to short term parking and there was our car with instructions as to how to get the keys inside of it. Not only was this process super easy but this rental car was almost $500 less than had I rented from a rental car company at the airport. We loaded up our Ford Edge and made our way to get some food....Chipotle!
We started our ~1:45 hour drive to Vegas - which turned into almost 3 hours due to ~4 miles of construction work. We finally arrived to our condo (the same area that we stayed in September) around 5pm after a very long day of traveling. It was so nice to finally arrive in St. George. Despite a long and semi stressful travel day, we took one look around and we were quickly reminded why we love it here.
Around 8pm mountain time, we were tired and ready to sleep. Thankfully, a good night of sleep was all we needed as we woke up on Tuesday morning around 6am feeling excited to get on our bikes to check out a new part of this Ironman race course.
More to come tomorrow.....