A great half-marathon, plus belle viste and hot chocolate!

Ciao tutti!  Tara and I ran a half-marathon (that's 13.1 miles or 21.something kilometers) on Lago di Garda (Lake Garda) today.  We drove up to the town of Riva del Garda yesterday and we stayed at Hotel Centrale:

Here is our hotel room:

The chiave was on a ridiculously heavy chain:

Here is the view out our finestra:

This clock tower was just outside:

We went to pick up our race numbers.  There was a band playing the same songs over and over again.  Here it is:

We ate dinner at a German/Italian restaurant.  We had canederli e goulasch (dumplings and goulash) and contorni (vegetables) and pane (bread):

We had cioccolato caldo afterwards:

Here are more foto of Riva del Garda:

 This Benetton finestra has maroni (chestnuts) in it:

This lotiony stuff has my name on it, sort of:

This Hello Kitty costs 290 Euro.  That's like 397 American dollars:

Here is a faccia:

Here are some local belle viste:

The race started at ten this mattina (morning).  The finish line was set up in front of our albergo:

 Here's my race number.  Tara was 280:

We dropped our stuff off at the parcheggio ten minutes away and up a big hill, because checkout was 11:30, then the people at the desk said we could take showers in our room after the race, so we had to plan on getting our stuff after the race.  My camera was in the macchina (car) during the race.

We met some BC students at the start.  They were studying in Parma and thought they'd run a half-marathon, because why not.

The race was not very hilly.  The terrain was mostly roads, with some bike paths.  A lot of it went by vineyards, and there were some little wooden bridges near the water.  The spectator weren't overwhelming, but there were plenty of them.

Tara and I didn’t mean to run together, but we started together, and we finished together, and we passed each other several times.  Our times:

	Time	Place	Pace (minute/mile)
Bridget (me)	1:42:34	1324	7:49.77
Tara	1:42:37	1328	7:50.00

As we all know, 1:42:34 and 1:42:37 both round to 1:43. 

There were a lot of really fast people!  We each got a medal like this:

The other side of the medal has our hotel on it:

After the race, we headed to the race expo place.  We got in a big line and one person gave us pasta, another put cheese on top, and another gave us forks, then another chopped us hunks of polenta and another chopped us chunks of a different kind of cheese.  After we ate, we got some of the tea and apple strudel that they were giving out in a different line.

Our goody bags weighed approximately 5.8 pounds:

The contents included acqua, isotonic sports drink, pineapple juice, yogurt-drink substance, breadsticks, cheese energy bar thing, mini breadsticks, Blistex sample, t-shirt, drawstring “backpack”, and some ads and catalogs.  Tara had orange jelly in hers.

After leaving our albergo, we visited Arco, a little town through which we had run.  Here is a faccia in Arco:

More Arco foto:

If we were there at the right time, we would have been able to buy Christamassy things here.

I got a cioccolato caldo con panna in Arco.  It was sweet and the cream was very creamy:

Om nom nom!

 Then we headed back to Lumignano, and we are there now.  Salve tutti from me, Bridget!