Lethbridge

First time going to this particular out of town festival. Shortly after signing up for it, I was already regretting it, as I realised I had too much stuff to do here, started to worry more about finances, and discovered who else was going and not going. But I went anyways.

The races themselves... Kindof poorly organized. The race starter was the worst, really didn't know what he was doing, there was a fair amount of drift but he wanted you to straighten out your boat early rather than keeping it at an angle to compensate, or keeping us in paddles up position for several seconds, etc. Tried to have all teams doing a 'running start' and this was poorly done. The best start was when we were in division A, all the boats knew what they were doing and the starter pretty much let the teams set themselves up, worked much better. The second worst thing was that there were no "consolation" races which every festival normally has, so some teams were already heading home sunday morning. Thirdly, our youth team did two mixed races against adult teams, but then just did the youth division race, instead of continuing in the regular mixed divisions, which would have been nice (considering they were beating many adult teams). On the positive side, the race location is pretty nice at that lake (though lethbridge still had some manurey farm smell). And the food on site was pretty good (well there was a vietnamese place I got all my meals from) and prices weren't jacked up.

For our performance... far exceeded my expectations. First two races put us into A division, which I sortof expected though I knew we might not... Our team was 50% from the 'parents' team who's only had about 4 practices and never raced before. But we were still up there with some competitive teams. Then in our third race we did excellent, beating out some others in order to proceed to the Div A Final, meaning we were in the top 5 teams, along with a few others from calgary and a couple teams that consider themselves 'national' teams (during the calgary races they will try to qualify to represent canada). We didn't medal, but the fact we made the top division is great. The 'newbies' on our team are definitely not newbies anymore, and will have some experience to bring back to their regular rec team. Once they get more practice and experience, they should be pretty impressive. Our youth team, as I mentioned, was beating some adult teams, and took the gold in the youth division, though there was a lethbridge youth team pretty close.

For personal fun... nothing like regular out of town races. Less people I knew, less people in my age group and interest group. And not that much to do in lethbridge. Still had a lot of laughs. On first arriving, thought it was very strange that there were lots of people in lawn chairs on the side of the road watching cars drive by. Thought this was perhaps the thing to do in lethbridge. There were a LOT of people doing it. Started noticing there were a fair number of vintage cars around though, so I guess people were out to watch those. But then, saturday evening, there were still lots of people doing that, though the vintage cars didn't seem to be around anymore. Jay found it very twilight-zone-ish. We bugged Kim all weekend about people in lethbridge committing suicide from the wind. There was a cheesecake cafe across the street from the hotel and I was craving some chocolate cake friday night, then found some people who were going there anyways and joined them. Got Hamid craving it too, so we were going to share, but then discovered someone else had just ordered the last couple pieces... turned out to be some of our youth who arrived just before us! I was eating tons all weekend (esp. the breakfast included at the hotel), even Kim said (of some extra food one night) "give it to scott, he seems to be perpetually hungry." Maybe I was a substitute for Sheldon? But then after all the races, sunday dinnertime, I suddenly shut down and didn't want to eat anything at all. We even happened to go to cheesecake again for dinner before leaving, but I no longer wanted my chocolate cake. Weird. Saturday evening the hotel waterslide was actually pretty good. Sunday found Andrew (formerly on topmade) and chatted with him a while, he's still hilarious, i miss having him on my team. Sunday after the races all the kids were waterfighting, and after being completely soaked himself, arnold was getting them to target certain other teams like yahoo and CRC as they passed by. Must have enjoyed commanding his personal horde. Got to hear Hamid's keys story from regina. Joked about potential new team names, think the winner was my proposed "Lane 3" though it would also be fun to steal others names like "Pacific Reach C". That's about it.