We woke up on Saturday, race day, and daddy made a quick trip to the track to get Alessandra registered, and then to pick up some breakfast. After breakfast we went back to the pool for a little more fun in the water, and then we packed up and headed to the track.

THE RACE: Not much to write about here. Although it's a cool event; with the big nicely groomed track, sponsor booths, and fans, unfortunately, much like the Mid West Nationals in Illinois, these nationals aren't good for the Striders at all. They just rush through the program as quickly as possible in order to get on with the schedule. Oh well, we know better now, and unless the trip (i.e. the destination, hotel, pool, etc.) is really worth the while it's much better racing at our local track for the Striders. Alessandra got bad starts, and finished 3rd in her 3 heats. She almost caught the leaders in the second race, but the track for the Striders was really short (about 1/3 of the length of what we use at our home track), and it was pretty hard to recover from a poor start. Because the 9 riders in the 4 yr. old class were separated into two groups she probably officially finished 5th or 6th, but who knows. They originally posted Alessandra as the overall winner online, and then changed it and only listed the top three. Overall it wasn't that great. Alessandra wasn't really into it, and the organization was terrible.


After the race we were all packed up with nowhere to go. It was early Saturday afternoon of a three day weekend, and a 4 hour drive home didn't sound good to anyone. We probably would have stayed another night at the Peppermill (because it was a pretty nice place), but the room we had the previous night, which was pretty nice, wasn't available. We looked into going to Downieville for a couple of nights- no luck; considered staying in Reno for about two seconds, and then came to our senses, and then realized that due to the Yosemite fire, and the smoke in the area of Tahoe, that our chances of jumping over the hill to South Lake and getting a hotel room were actually pretty good despite it being Labor Day weekend. After a quick call to the South Lake Tahoe chamber of commerce our beliefs were confirmed. We were able to get online and book a suite the Tahoe Resort Hotel, right at State Line.It was perfect: we had some fun in the pool; great dinners; a gondola ride to the top of Heavenly, and water tubing for Alessandra; and then topped off the stay with the Sunday night fireworks show, which was just a five minute walk from our hotel, and most importantly, the kid's first fireworks.


Looks like Daddy's old number...
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