Tobacco Road Marathon and Ruthy Goes Southern

There's been no cooking, but there's been fun, amazing, wonderful family stuff going on!

The snow is melting. MELTING!!!! And the sun feels better than it did a month back! SWEET!

Ol' Dave and I went south to North Carolina to visit our daughter's beautiful family, and meet up with my son's family who traveled to NC for a marathon.

Now why would anyone travel to NC from New York for a 26 mile run?

Well, that would be because my daughter-in-law is an amazing distance runner and she was stepping up from half-marathons to full marathons and we wanted to be there to see it... and help with three beautiful kids!

That's the best part of all, I was surrounded by six amazing grandchildren and warm weather... what a treat!

What a hoot! We had to park five miles from the race and take a shuttle bus in. Then they stopped letting buses in that way and we had to take the shuttle bus back five miles... And got there in time to see the finish of the race.

It was wonderful. Ol' Dave (who has run two marathons) was out on the course, cheering her on, running (kind of, we are OLDER now) catching her at various miles to encourage her because 26 miles is l-o-n-g.

And Matt, our son, was biking the course to make sure she had water... and to help clear the way through the half-marathoners for the marathoners as they came through.

We had the time of our lives! I love North Carolina, Cary, NC is a gorgeous town and prospering in so many ways. Beautiful, and gorgeous USA baseball training facilities. I meant to get a picture but... sigh... I was watching gorgeous kids! If you look behind the kids, that's the baseball field!

Karen ran a great race, placed 2nd among all women, qualified for next year's Boston Marathon and placed 20th out of 1145 entrants in a time just under three hours....

Amazing. 

An hour after the race, Karen and Dave chatting while Karen was answering facebook best wishes...

Dave looks like he's texting. I promise you, he wasn't. We haven't gotten quite that far into the new millennium yet!!! :)

Dave and Katie, our oldest granddaughter...

Dave and Nathan, our oldest grandson... Give him a few years and he'll be taller than his Grandpa!

We made cupcakes... we sang happy birthday to Grandpa (today's his birthday!) and we had a great weekend!

So while there are no recipes to share, there was the recipe for good memories and family time. The best recipe of all!