Nike Women's Half Marathon San Francisco-Arrival and packet pick-up

This past weekend was one of the most fabulous weekends that I have had in a long time.  Don't get me wrong, I have had some awesome weekends recently, but this one takes the cake!!!  I ran the Nike Women's Half Marathon in San Francisco, California.

I enjoyed this fabulous weekend with another runner friend who is also a reading specialist.  I met her through my grad school cohort and we were fast friends!  Ironically, she is actually quite a fast runner too ;)

Our journey started around midnight on Friday.  I picked my fast runner friend up and we headed up to Reagan Airport in DC.  Traffic was quite light, not surprisingly since we left at midnight and we made great time.  We rolled into economy parking (which FYI is a bit of a misnomer, as it's $17 a day!), woke up the gate person, and were on a shuttle to the airport by 3:15 am.  Thankfully both flights took off and arrived on time and we landed in Cali around 9:45 am.  I even caught a few zzz's on the plane, which is rare for me.

The real fun began as we navigated the public transportation system to get from the airport to our hotel in Union Square.  We took an airport shuttle to the Bart station and then stared at the Bart map for a solid 5 minutes before determining which stop we needed and which line would get us there.  It took another 10 minutes to purchase our tickets at the kiosk, and not because we were clueless, it was just a slow process.

We were quite proud of ourselves! :)

We met a super friendly guy on the Bart who gave us some key tips that really proved to be helpful over the course of the weekend.  We hightailed it from the Bart station to check in to our hotel.  We stayed at the Hotel Beresford and I would highly recommend it.  They staff and facility were awesome!!!

After we dropped off our bags, we headed to packet pick-up at the Westin.  It was super well organized and we were in and out in a matter of minutes.  The whole weekend was well organized, the only issues we had were related to the lack of communication from Nike.  But I will get into that more in a future post reviewing the actual race.

We left the Westin and bee-lined to the Nike store to shop for SF gear and find our names on the wall.  I found mine and was even able to pose with it!  Woot woot!

After waiting in line to check out at Nike and dropping $125 on two items (which I LOVE) we headed back to the hotel to make our game plan.  Stay tuned for our evening adventures on night #1.