Davis Cup. 35 days 'til graduation.

This weekend the defending World Champion U.S. Davis Cup team has been taking on the French team, here in Winston Salem. It is the second year in a row that there have been Davis Cup matches here in Winston. Last year Laura and I went to all the matches, as the U.S. downed Spain on their way to the championship. This year we attended the doubles match on Saturday with Laura's parents. Unfortunately, the Bryan brothers lost, but we had a great time and got to watch some very good tennis.

Last night, the four of us ate dinner at River Birch Lodge, had some birthday cake (which Laura made) to celebrate Bill's upcoming b-day, and watched Into The Wild... very good movie that I would highly recommend. The book is also good.

Two Weeks until my exams start, and 35 days until graduation...hard to believe that law school is about to be over! The last couple of weeks will be busy, then I will hopefully have a week or so to catch my breath before graduation and a summer of bar prep.
"The future is something which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is." C.S. Lewis

more car trouble, Charleston, CRBR

Cooper River Bridge Run

As I wrote the last entry I was sitting on a couch, in the Thompson's apartment, in downtown Charleston, waiting for a tow truck to arrive from Columbia to pick up our car and take it back to the transmission place that we had picked it up from the day before. We were gone from Tuesday-Sunday. Our car was in the repair shop from Tuesday-Thursday and again from Friday-Sunday. It was a bit of an inconvenience, but certainly could have been much worse. Yesterday, Anna drove us to Columbia to pick up our car. After about 1.5 hours on the interstate (headed to Winston) the over drive light started blinking and I thought we were going to be on the side of the interstate...again. The car made it 3 more miles to the next exit where we pulled into a gas station. While there, my dad called and informed us that he had talked to someone at a Mazda dealership who had told him that there transmissions tend to get overheated on long trips and that we should stop every hour or so and let it cool off. We did this, and it worked well. We are now back in Winston and the car is doing fine. We are going to have a cooling block put on the transmission, hopefully this will take care of the problem.

Despite the car hiccup, we had a great time in Charleston. On Thursday night, Ryan and Anna took us to dinner at Southend Brewery & Smokehouse. On Friday, Ryan, Laura and I spent the afternoon on the beach at Kiawah Island. Anna works on the Island, so after work she joined us for a bike ride around the Island (not on the beach).

On Saturday, the four of us ran (with 40,000+ other people) in the Cooper River Bridge Run (CRBR) 10K. It is a huge annual Charleston race (event) that happened to be the same weekend that we were there, Laura and I registered for the race on Friday and ran in it on Saturday. On Saturday afternoon, We ate lunch at one of my favorite Charleston spots, Poe's Tavern.

Laura and I walked down King Street and around The Battery on Saturday evening, we then met up with Ryan and Anna at The Kickin' Chicken to watch the final four games and eat dinner.

We had a great time with Ryan and Anna and really enjoyed Charleston!

Transmission trouble. Hilton Head

This week is Laura's spring break, so we decided that I could skip class and we could take a trip. We left Tuesday morning, headed for Hilton Head. Our plan was to spend two nights in Hilton Head and then drive up to Charleston and spend 3 nights with Ryan and Anna Thompson there.

At about 12:45 Tuesday afternoon we were passing through Columbia, SC, when the transmission in our car gave out. We spent about 1.5 hours on the side of the interstate, then we were towed to "the best transmission place in Columbia." At this point we did not know what was wrong with our car, we hoped that it was something that could be quickly fixed so that we could resume our trip to Hilton Head. Unfortunately, we learned that our car would not be ready to go again until Thursday afternoon. At that point we had a couple of options, we could spend the first few days of our trip in Columbia, SC, or we could try to rent a car and get to Hilton Head. We opted for the latter. Essentially every rental car place in Columbia was out of vehicles, but thankfully we finally found someone who had one car left, Rent-A-Wreck. We jumped on the opportunity to take over a Chevy Cavalier for a few days.

After our unexpected detour in Columbia, we left at around 5:00 for Hilton Head...in our new (temporary) ride.

In Hilton Head, we stayed at the Crowne Plaza Resort. We loved the resort and the Island! Despite our car troubles, we had a great time there! On Tuesday night we went for a run around the plantation that our resort was on, then went to a sports bar for a late dinner. On Wednesday, we decided to bike to the Harbour Town Lighthouse and check it out, then bike to The Salty Dog Cafe for lunch, then back to the resort of an evening on the beach. The island has great bike trails that follow major roads and make it easy to get around. It ended up being a bit more difficult than we anticipated, mainly because our bike trails kept dead ending into resorts. After riding around on the island for an hour or so, we decided that it would be better to just get on the beach and bike around the island until we came to the lighthouse. After biking on the beach for a while we decided that the lighthouse could wait and we should just get lunch. We finally made it to the Cafe and had a great, lunch there. If you are ever on Hilton Head, you have to check out The Salty Dog Cafe! After eating we biked back to our resort, via the beach. The excursion took a bit longer than we had anticipated, but we had a great time. On Wednesday night, we ate dinner at the Old Fort Pub. A very nice seafood restaurant on the water that I would highly recommend, catch a sunset there if you can!

We got up early Thursday morning so that we could see the sunrise on the beach, unfortunately it looked like a tropical storm was coming in...so there was no sun to be seen. We ate breakfast and packed up before going on a run around the plantation. We checked out of the hotel and decided to drive over to the lighthouse and eat lunch before leaving the island. We ate lunch at The Water Front Cafe, another great restaurant that I would recommend visiting.

We are now in Charleston, but the car saga has continued... more to come.