Lots of activity, or not, depending on your point of view.
On the 31st, finally, I got in my October 200k. That was a ride north, beautiful weather and a great day on the bike. After I got back, I tinkered with the new bike, making some adjustments.
In the meantime (forget if I've covered this before), we had done our two at-home covid tests and were clean. We then did a PCR test at the local facility and that came back clean. Jeffrey & Sara, Matthew and Emma were clean. Zoe has recovered. With that news, Jeffrey could go ahead with his travel plans ...
He flew into Orlando Sanford; we picked him up and went to Disney World ESPN for the race registration / rider packet pickup. That was on Friday. We met the Davies, sans Kim, at Disney Springs and had lunch, then headed back to NSB. Jeffrey went to the Davies' rental because he was going to be racing first thing (earlier than first thing) on Saturday. He and Kim knocked off that 10k with ease.
We planned to head to the Disney area late on Saturday and stay there for two nights. Although Sandy had originally planned on NOT seeing the running pair off on Sunday morning, she decided to join in the fun. We left the Marriott Courtyard at 2am and got to the Epcot parking lot before the Davies. The race was due to start at 5am, and did. In the meantime we hung around in the cold, but dry. Kim and Jeffrey both got good spots in their respective corrals - Kim in 1, Jeffrey in 2. With several thousand runners it's important to get there early if you want to have a reasonable finish time, otherwise you end up walking in the crowd for quite some time before you can stretch your legs.
They both had good runs. This was a half marathon. For Jeffrey this was an accomplishment - getting here with all the training required and then finishing. Rough numbers, Jeffrey finished in 1:55. Kim finished 10 minutes faster. 10 minutes is a big deal and she did it with ease, running with some friends and hamming it up for the photographers. It was a big deal for Jeffrey too - his pace was actually faster in the half than it had been for the 10k. That's probably just as well; no point in pushing so hard on the 10k that you blowup on the half.
We retired back to your hotel; the Davies to their rental; got a little rest and then met for breakfast at 10:30. From there we headed to Epcot, which was very busy with the running crowds, and had an early dinner at 9 Dragons. We stayed for the fireworks, a new display. It was still cold.
On Monday we met the Davies and Jeffrey at Disney Hollywood Studios, wandered around for the day, took in some rides and movies, had a good lunch and relatively early dinner and then headed back to NSB, this time with Jeffrey. On Tuesday morning, he and I left about 9:30 for the airport and by mid afternoon he was home in PA. With both Sanford and Lehigh Valley being small airports, flying is so much easier.
From there, we recovered. Cassie had had a stayover with Jim, Joanne and Gabby the first night and then for the 2nd night, Lisa (and we think her mom) were here, along with Lisa's dog (and we think her Mom's). Cassie was well looked after and entertained with HER friends. We saw pictures and videos of Cassie having fun.
Jeffrey has partly converted to using a T-Mobile 5g internet connection. Partly because while he was away it went down and he told Sara how to reconnect to their cable provider. I decided to try out their service here and first got the run-around from the telephone sign-up who wanted all sorts of personal information for a credit check and told me that if I did this through a T-Mobile store that it would take a couple of months to get the hardware. Not, as I found out. That was total BS. However, my story didn't end until I made 3 trips to TM. First we were mostly through the process, hardware on the counter in front of me and the credit check couldn't go through because I've had all three agencies locked for about 10 years. Nothing could be done. I went home. I dug through piles of papers and found a letter from Experion with the PIN, went online, created a single-use PIN, went back to TM the next day. Nada. Almost through the process and we hit the same roadblock. They use TransUnion. They hadn't told us (me or the sales guy). I went back home ... again. Determined, I went onto the TU website and it was a lot less secure than Experion. A simple signon, password retrieval and I hit "pause" on my freeze. I went back to TM (3rd visit), and again went through the process and this time cleared that hurdle. The story doesn't end. The sales guy couldn't get through the checkout process. Back on the phone with their sales support people, they had to go through the checkout and hand the "cart" back to him.
So we're done. No. I had it running but I couldn't sign onto their website. I called customer service and they found that my email address had not been entered by the sales guy and therefore I couldn't get into my account. We sorted that out. I then talked to him about speed, which is pretty variable and surprisingly not-fast. Well it seems that the 5g tower that I'm supposed to be automatically connecting to is being worked on. Nov 23 is the live date. Ok. We shall see. It's working and I can stream. I notice the difference with the laptop. It's funny that internet speed is now FASTER at the cottage. Go figure. Thanks Elon.
So why do all this ? Well, Spectrum has been creeping up in price and is now almost $80. TM is $50. SP has also been a bit variable these days. I'm hoping that TM is more consistent. We shall see. I'll give it a month at least before I cancel Spectrum. I'm also curious about TM's mobile prices but I'll keep that on hold for now. I've spent enough time with them over the past 48 hours.
Onward ...
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