Fall Fun

We had a gorgeous day on Wednesday and really took advantage of it with our outing to Zoet Water (see photo). The colors on the trees were beautiful! The boys were hot to get to the natural spring, where we filled up our sports bottles and then continued on our way through the woods. Of course a fall walk in Belgium is not complete if you don't end it by stopping at a café for a coffee, or in the case of the boys, a pancake or waffle with ice cream, whipped cream, hot chocolate sauce, powdered sugar, or carmelized apples on it....I was good and limited myself to the coffee, but even that is a real treat here:

Yes, Mom and Mark, that's a mini cream puff on that little plate!

Yesteday we headed out to Stefaan's home town for the yearly tradition on the first of November to visit the graves of family members. It's actually a lovely tradition and the cemetaries look very festive with huge flower arrangements on all the graves. We bumped into Stefaan's cousin Dirk and his family and talked with them for a bit - turns out that his wife Nancy has also taken up running! What a funny coincidence! We both agreed that the best thing about running is how when you start out you can hardly run for 30 seconds and you can simply not imagine how you are ever going to run for 5 kilometers, but how you see yourself progress and get steadily better, and eventually you can do it. So hang in there, Joy, you're going to get there!

I'm getting so excited for the Corrida in Leuven...not only is Joy going to do the 4 km, but her hubby Patrice decided he's going to join us in the 8 km! If they still give out two bottles of wine for participating, we're looking at 8 bottles - that will make for a very jolly post-race party, ha ha!

Back to business...this morning I biked to the gym to do my speed workout, it was not so cold out which was nice. I did 7 times 2 minutes at fast tempo plus 2 minutes recovery. My total distance for the 28 minutes was 4.25 km. The running went fine, I felt kind of tired to start out with, but once I got going it was okay. I was sweating like a pig when I got finished - ugh!