Birthday Trip

 My friend Olympia and I have birthdays within a week of each other (same year).  She is one of my all-time favorite people.  Just one of those really good people.  As Benjamin Franklin said, nothing is as popular as goodness.

Anyway, Olympia and I did a competition diet last year, with the winner (losing the most body weight by percentage) buying the other one dinner.  This year we both thought we could use another competition since it is very motivating to lose weight when you are in a competition!  The first time we did this it was for only 8 weeks, and I put back on the weight pretty quickly after our competition was over.  This year, we decided to go for a 4 month competition, ending at our birthdays.  We decided we would end our competition with a weekend beach trip and the loser would buy dinner.  This time around, I bought dinner!

I started at 197 pounds, and by the half-way mark I was down to 182, but those last two months were tough.  Between birthdays and parties, I ended up the competition at 185.  Now I am back to 192.  Not liking the direction this is going, but I am not going to worry about it until January.  I am actually working on a post all about the never ending diet struggle, but that is for another day.

Unfortunately, the weather didn't cooperate that well, but we made the best of it!

There was a beautiful sunset the night we arrived, despite the drizzle.

A rainbow!!!

Olympia's artful take of me and the rainbow.

 The next day at the beach was actually quite chilly.  We didn't last too long.  My mom made this sun hat when I was a teenager.  I still have it!

 The weather was a little chilly for sunbathing, but it was perfect for walking.  We took several long walks.  One morning we saw absolutely TONS of crabs.

We also brought our bikes and did a lot of bike riding.  We biked around a state park one day and then Fort Pickens the next day.   We tried some "adventurous" paths and ended up doing a lot of biking through the mud.  But we did it!

You can actually see my face getting puffier as the trip went on.  I was 185 when we left on the trip, 3 days later I was at 194 (that is 9 pounds in 3 days).  I was able to lose all of this within a week of returning; it was just so much salty food I guess.  It totally surprised me, though because we biked A LOT and even with the cool weather, I sweat plenty.  Who knows!

Antonio is CRAZY about recycling.  When we go on trips, he will save all of our recyclables to take home.  I couldn't believe that they had recycling containers at our hotel, so I had to take a few pictures of me recycling to send to Antonio!