El Prieto 2006 edition and assorted other weekend activities

trail signThis past weekend was quite a whirlwind of activity. In fact, all of last week was a whirlwind of activity. We were in San Diego from Tuesday around noon to Friday around noon on business, then we drove to Pasadena so we could mark the trail for Chuck’s annual El Prieto Handicap. We were done marking the trail about 6:30pm, home by about 8pm, unpacked and exhausted by 10:30pm (Chuck stayed up until about 1am handicapping the entrants), then up again around 5am to head BACK up to Pasadena for the start of the race at Millard Campground. The race reverses direction each year, and this was a downhill year. I ran it for the first time last year when it was uphill, so this was my first time going downhill. It was a lot of fun; we had 36 people show, and t-shirts were given to all. We were back home by 11:30am to help with the garage sale that my niece and my friend Cheryl were holding at our house. We found them all in good spirits, having spent the morning drinking Bloody Marys, selling and buying each other’s stuff and generally having a good time (Cheryl’s comment was, “Let’s do this EVERY weekend!” – right before she went inside and passed out). Sales were decent, and everything was cleaned up by about 3pm. Good thing, because an hour later, people started arriving for the post-race party. Our friend Kyra cooked beer can chicken (which involved shoving a beer can up a whole chicken’s ass then bbq’ing it for a couple of hours), and we also grilled hot dogs. It was the debut of our newly redesigned pond that Chuck turned on for the first time that afternoon. We had thought about christening it with champagne, but in the end our friends Dave and Sylvia’s dog Paris, a Lab/Golden Retriever mix who really likes water christened it. She jumped in then just stood there – where could she go, after all, she was as big as the pond. She jumped in a couple more times before the end of the evening. Mia looked on in horror, not being a water dog herself.

Pics of the race here.