I’m almost at the end of my week-long vacation, and I have to say that it has been wonderful. I have managed to fit in an impressive amount of eating, sleeping, running, watching TV, sleeping, reading, petting my cat, sleeping, talking to my husband, and just generally enjoying life. I spent most of my vacation at home just catching up on sleep and relaxing, but we did take one brief trip to Western Mass to visit a friend from med school (and eat more good food!). Saturday we managed to drag ourselves out of bed around 9 am and finally leave the driveway around 11:15. We made it out to Wilbraham (home of Friendly’s!) by 1 pm. We spent most of the afternoon hanging out with my friend and playing Rockband. Good times. We left around 4 pm to drive up to our hotel in Northampton. Due to some unforseen traffic (big accident on I-91, I guess), it took us almost 2 hours to travel 25 miles. Fortunately, we managed to entertain ourselves by playing 20 questions. Here are just some of animals we managed to guess: kangaroo, jelly fish, butterfly, ant, sloth, human, zebra, parrot, brontosaurus, manatee, crocodile…
Anyway, when we finally made it to Northampton, we checked into our lovely hotel, the Clarion Hotel and Conference Center. Thanks to priceline once again for getting us a fabulous deal! You know the hotel will be a little sketchy when this is the picture on their website:
Thankfully, the inside was much nicer looking:
After we checked in, we quickly changed into running clothes and headed over to the Norwottuck Rail Trail for a gorgeous evening run. Here’s a picture of the trail taken from their website during a sunny afternoon. It was even prettier when we ran it.
Of course, after that arduous work out, we needed to properly refuel, so we headed over to the Eastside Grill for an absolutely fabulous dinner. Eddie had the blackened ribeye, and I had the scallops with a crab and blue cheese fondue. If you are ever in Northampton, I highly recommend this restaurant. After thoroughly stuffing ourselves, we headed over to Amherst to check out the Moan and Dove, a very highly rated beer bar. Yes, my husband specifically chose Northampton as our vacation destination so that we could check out this bar. Don’t even ask. I have to say that I was not that impressed. Perhaps because the many college kids made me feel old. Or perhaps I was just too full from our excellent dinner to appreciate the two beers I tried.
Anyway, my favorite part of the vacation came Sunday afternoon. We stopped at a local dairy farm, Flayvors of Cook Farm, to eat ice cream and hang out with the cows. As you may have gathered from the rest of this blog, I am somewhat obsessed with animals, so I really enjoyed seeing all the cows, not to mention the cat wandering around. We took some very amusing pictures on Eddie’s cell phone, but they become very small blurry images when I try to post them here. 
On another note, last week was my first official build up week in preparation for half marathon training. My goal was: 3, 2, 3, 2 for a total of 10 miles. I actually ran: 2, 3, 3.9, 2.7 for a total of 11.6. Excellent. I’m trying to get my training log to automatically post my most recent runs on this website, but so far I’m not technically savvy enough to do it. Anyone out there have experience getting runningahead.com to work with the widgets on wordpress??
