A great week. I finally got some leave and took the opportunity to go to Washington, D.C. and compete in the Army 10-miler. What an awesome race. A lot of the Vets that have had various types of amputations and visual impairments also competed, talk about inspiration! I thought a lot about all the work we did in Iraq and Afghanistan and to see them out there competing was incredible. Look up the Army 10-miler website and read some of the stories, they're something else. The time spent in DC also allowed me to see some of my old friends from deployments and also family members. Pictured above is Carl and I, we were in Ramadi, Iraq together for 8 months. What a good friend and extremely smart guy. It was fun to reminisce about the deployment, I guess it was a warm up for when I'm very old, very retired and hanging out at the VFW! Sarah was another person that ran and hung out with us for a while, she and I were deployed to Afghanistan together, another fantastic person. A funny story to follow later. My brother Dan, who I haven't seen in a about a year and a half, and my cousin Dina, who I haven't seen in over 15 years, also were there. Dan participated in his first run in about 10 years and finished great, in the top half of 21,000 runners! Dina smoked the run with a 1 hour 28 minute time. We have all agreed to meet up next year somewhere to run together again, probably the Flying Pig 1/2 Marathon in Cincinnati in May. Now for the story. Myself, Dan and Jack (Dan's friend) decided to scope out a place to eat and watch football after the race, Sarah to join us later. We went to a sports pub first and it was packed, standing room only. The greeter said that the owner also owned the restaurant down the street and it was empty with plenty of televisions with football on. We headed down the street and went into the place. It was empty as advertised and we decided to order some food. The menus came with a naked lady on the front cover, that's when we realized we were sitting in a strip club, the neon lights and low lighting also clued us in! We stayed because we thought that the dancers were off on Sunday for the games, and we had to wait for Sarah. Everything went well until the 4:00 games started, that's when the dancers headed for the stage! We were gentlemen and walked out with Sarah, although the dancer was probably depressed when 3 guys walked out when she started doing her thing on stage! haha. We went to the original restaurant and there was now space for us. We'll be talking about that for a while. That's enough excitement for this entry. Over all a great weekend. Take care.Dave
