I’m thinking about signing up for a race and the event uses Active.com for their registration platform. I don’t love Active, mainly because they charge an exorbitant “processing fee” for credit cards. They typically though offer a free 30-day-trial which waives up to $10 on these fees for each registration. I usually sign up and […]

I’m flying back to the USA today (and into tomorrow… and then laying over in Dulles for close to 10 hours… and then flying home from there).  Instead of once again documenting the rectangular mystery cuisine entrees of the inflight meals or waxing poetic about the logline synopses of the various international and domestic movies […]

Last year Marie Frances forgot the bibs for the 27th Annual race so rather than let them go to waste, she used them for this, the 28th Anniversary event.  Which is why my bib says I’m running the 27th Anniversary event.  There’s no date on it so it’s not a huge thing… and the race […]

The main focus of the morning was on previewing the route for tomorrow’s marathon.  Apparently the owners of the Moshi Club, the original starting location which was 1km from where we were staying, wanted to jack up the price for the rental fees.  Marie Frances wasn’t about to pay triple the previously agreed price so […]

Last night I heard a buzzing by my ear. At first I thought I might be in some sort of bumble-bee knock off of Jaws: The Revenge, with that Boone bumble bee hunting me down in a far flung location just as that great white shark pursued Mrs. Brody to the Caribbean in that terrible, […]

The St Mary’s Orphanage was pitched to us as a Belgian charity place Marie Frances has supported throughout the years.  So when she said she was going to visit and donate some items brought by Ed and Eileen, a bunch of us jumped at the chance to go with her. But first we had to […]

I awoke this morning with an extremely swollen lower lip.  It felt like a sequel to that old urban legend about waking up in a bathtub of ice with a note saying, “Call a Doctor… we took your kidney!”  Only this time I awoke to a midnight Botoxing with a note beside me saying, “Call […]

<< Comm-Sat Connection Restored >> <<ETA to full communication signals: 127 hours, 43 minutes >> Meh.  Not my thing.  The multi-day hiking.  The multi-night camping.  The no showering.  The bush toilets.  The sleeping bags and drafty huts.  The plummeting temperatures and freezing sleet whipped in your face at 90 km/hr.  The lack of Diet Coke […]

I suspect there won’t be great WiFi heading up Kilimanjaro… despite the fact that apparently 80,000 people a year make the attempt to climb. Somebody at the briefing said there was a 23% success rate of getting to the summit, but our guides Antipas and Jooma cherry picked around that question to say they’d never […]

I just got out of thenclimb briefing. I’m hyperventilating. I think I’m woefuly underestimating this thing but keep telling myself at worse is five crappy days. Everybody else is going on about hiking boots, camelbaks, altitude sickness pills, gaiters, layers for clothes. I’m renting $94 worth of gear from the guides (taking maybe a fourth […]