Adventures

I loved the Abbey so much last week that I included it in my desperate attempts to make conversation with Clarence babbling, and suggested it might be a nice run. My friend had told me it was only three miles, so when he suggested we run it together on Sunday I said yes. It's pretty flat for Geneseo, the road goes along the bottom of a hill, so it seemed completely do-able. Just to be sure I wouldn't embarrass myself though, I asked my friend Brittney if she would like to go earlier in the week for a practice run. She's a good sport, and agreed, but she was only free to go after 3:30. Since we planned on running there and walking back we knew we'd be cutting it close with the daylight, but we figured it wouldn't take us too long to run three miles. We both thought about wimping out when the time finally came, it was cold, and we've both been skipping the gym, but we stuck to our plan. It wasn't a bad run too, it was pretty flat, and we made sure to face traffic and I only had one ear bud in because my ear buds are ghetto and only one works, but it let me hear if a car was coming. We ran and ran, and eventually we began to get tired. I was secretly wondering if I had messed up the directions, but I didn't say anything because I thought it would be bad for morale. We eventually saw the sign for the abbey, and turned down the road. It was a two second drive, so I assumed we were almost there, and taking a page from Emily's book I cranked up the S Club 7. The abbey still wasn't in sight midway through the song though, so I started it again. It actually took three playings before we got there, but we made it in the end. Walking into the delicious bread smell was wonderful. Brittney loves churches, and we browsed in the bread shop, and read some of the spiritual guidance books. The monks were out and about too, so that was very nice. They wear robes and everything. We sat in the chapel for a bit, but it was getting dark, so we didn't stay very long. It had taken us much longer than we had expected to get to the abbey, and it was already dark out. I was pretty stressed out by what I thought was our awful time, it seemed like the Turkey Trot would be too much for me. We were walking back, chatting about our lives, trying to keep warm and not freak out about how dark and scary things were when a car that had passed us pulled back and stopped next to us. We were both having terrified serial killer thoughts, but it was a woman that we had seen at the abbey. She offered to give us a ride, and even though every story about taking rides from strangers went through my mind, we got in the car. (In our defense, we both thought she was a nun. She was wearing a scarf on her head, and we had seen her talking to a monk in a way that made it seem like they were pals. And we were more scared of being hit by a car then having to overpower a tiny Asian woman.) She was totally harmless and took us back to campus, so now I feel like I can say I've hitchhiked and I never need to do it again. When we got back to Steuben though, we mapquested our route, and discovered that we had actually ran like five miles. So whoo us. I'm ready to OWN the Turkey Trot.