Happy 4th!

We had a fun and relaxing day off yesterday. We headed a few miles north to Rogers Park (a Chicago neighborhood) where our friend Fritz lives. Our friends Ali and Eddie brought dragged their grill with them to join us. We feasted on brats, burgers, and chicken, along with loads of veggies and bean salads. Yum. Then we jumped in Fritz's car and headed up to Evanston for some fireworks. Fritz is a former cab driver (a college job... how cool is that?), so driving with him is an adventure, literally. He doesn't have much patience for pedestrians.

By some miracle, we found a parking spot that seemed too good to be true. But the car wasn't towed or ticketed while we were away! Then we walked across the Northwestern campus to the beach where we sprawled out on some blankets and watched fireworks. We were so close to the fireworks that it looked like they were falling down on top of us. It looked like multi-colored stars were raining on you. We'll definitely be heading back there again next year. Fantastic. (Although we did get a tiny bit of ash fluttering down on our faces.)

Not much else to report except that Ali and Eddie make Rob and I feel like crazy slackers in the running department -- they're training for the Chicago marathon, so they run 20 miles a week. It's been, what, three or four weeks of logging miles and I haven't hit 20 miles yet. We leave for our trip on August 17, which means we've got just six more weeks to complete OP. So I'm setting out the new goal of 10 miles per week, which should put me over 75 miles by the time we leave. In the mean time, here's our totals:

Kat's Stats
7/4: 2.51 miles
TOTAL: 16.72 miles (weak!)

Rob's Stats
7/4 and another run a couple days ago: 4.74 miles
TOTAL: 24.03 miles (getting close to a marathon! :)