Monday, July 10: travel day.  flew to California, immediately went to meetings down in San Jose until 6pm, then drove up to San Francisco.  Had room service for dinner and went to bed early.

Tuesday, July 11:  Up early for conference calls, which lasted until about 9am.  Then I headed down to the gym for an easy endurance session.  First was 30  minutes on the treadmill at 15% grade.  Then 30 minutes on the elliptical, easy intervals.

Then I showered, got dressed and headed out for meetings around the big conference.  The meetings took me out to about 5pm, then we had a corporate function until 9pm, then I was out with customers until 1:15am.

Wednesday, July 12:  No surprise, I didn’t get up to work out.  I needed to be at the conference site by 8am because I was giving a presentation at 8:30am.  This wrapped up by around 10, and then I was in meetings and conference calls the rest of the day until 6pm when I drove off to the airport.  I caught the red eye back to Boston.  No training. 😦

Thursday, July 13th:  I slept maybe 2 hours on the flight and arrived in Boston around 5am.  I headed straight to Cape Cod.  We were having some guests coming to the house later in the day.  I got to the house around 7am and went to bed for about 3 more hours of sleep.  The rest of the day was a flurry of cleaning and shopping, and they arrived around 4pm.  No training.

Friday, July 14th:  We still had guests, and there was no way to really sneak away to train.  However, we were pretty active.  We went for a nice walk around the north side of the island.  When it was low tide, we went out and gathered about 3 dozen oysters from the sand flats around the island.  These were a very tasty addition to dinner on Friday and Saturday.

Later, my friend and I kayaked around the island.  This is a pretty cool route.  You start on the northeast beach, and cross Loagy Bay.  You then enter a labyrinth of channels in the salt marsh and you have to guess which one will take you to cut under the bridge.  All other channels are dead ends.   Coming out of from under the bridge, we saw a big white bird.  It looked like a Great Blue Heron, but it was white instead of grey.  I would have sworn it was a Crane, but we don’t really get that species around here.  After we exited the salt marsh, the route continues along the south shore of the island.  There is a platform that has been built for the Osprey’s to build nests on.  This one has a big nest and there was an Osprey standing on top of it glaring at us as we paddled past.  Then rowed up along the outer shore of the island, and back into the wind to the beach where we launched.  It’s probably about 5km of paddling and it took us about an hour.  Not much in the way of aerobic exercise, but good fun.

The tides are perfect right now.  The low tide is in the late morning, and the high tide was around 6pm.  We were hanging out at the house and the weather got sunnier and warmer as the day went on.  Around 5pm, the wind died down and it seemed like it might be fun to let our guests try my new boat.  So, I carted the oars and boat down the stairs to water.  I took a quick spin, maybe 15 minutes or so, and then everybody took a turn.  The hardest exercise that I got was the half dozen or so trips up and down the ~80 steps from the house to the beach.

Saturday, July 15th:  Again, the started out pretty grey.  I slept in, and then after breakfast went for walk at low tide.  I walked out as far as I could and as I went, I thought it would be fun to see how far that was on the chart.  You can get an idea of how far the sand flats go, and this wasn’t even a very low tide, and was starting to come in by the time I reached the outer point.

Here’s the view back to the island from the farthest out point.

Just like Friday, the day got nicer and nicer as it got later.  By the afternoon, it was gloriously sunny, and there was very little wind.  I again launched the Maas from the steps at high tide.  I went for a quick 20 minute row, and then everyone else had a go at it.  Just like Friday, the major exercise was going up and down the stairs.