Chicago Style Gymnastics Meet

I have definitely fallen off the wagon in the past few days in terms of trying to post a daily thought on growing more in love with God. So this post is to show you what I've been up to... :)

Last Thursday, Anna and I traveled with several of her fellow gymnastics team members to Chicago to the largest women's gymnastics meet in the world! 4300 gymnasts of all ages descended on the city this past weekend for this huge event. It was held at Chicago's Navy Pier, which was a really neat venue. We had girls competing at Levels 7, 8 and 9 on Friday and it was a busy day of competition. Anna had a really good day on the Vault, Bars and especially her Floor routine. (you can see that video down below) The Beam continues to be her nemesis, but she gets better each time on that, so it's all good. :) On Saturday, we took to the streets of Chicago and did a lot of sightseeing and shopping with Anna's friends and coaches - so that was a lot of fun. Here are some pictures from our adventure:

Anna, Autumn and Anna (Daily) with the skyline in the background. At some point, we were trying to figure out if the tall building in the background was actually the Sears tower, but it turned out to be the John Hancock Tower. It was early on in the trip and we were still trying to get our bearings. ;-)

We arrived Thursday afternoon and the first thing we found near our hotel was a mall. :) And the most fun store we found was the Lego store... go figure. That's Anna with Indiana Jones and below are the 'moms' with Lego Grandma... Darlene, Misayo, Tonya and me.

This is a Lego replica of the Marriot hotel where we were staying. It really did look just like that, except for the dinosaur tail! ;-)

We had beautiful, sunny weather while we were there - but there was a good bit of snow around and it was VERY cold! The girls didn't seem to mind it at all, though. :)

A little fun in the pool on Thursday night.

The view from the Navy Pier as we arrived for the meet on Friday afternoon.

I loved these balloons they had at the entrance to the meet - fun!

Here are the girls waiting for their turn on their floor routines. Time to get serious...

This was the view from the top of the Willis (Sears) Tower looking across Lake Michigan. I was absolutely captivated by the size of this 'lake.' It wasn't like any lake I have ever seen - stretching on to the horizon, even with the view from 103 floors up! ... amazing.

The next few pictures were taken in the plexiglass 'boxes' that were hanging on the side of the building. I can't believe I actually walked out into one of these things - it was pretty scary, but worth it, to get the picture! :)



The girls (and coaches!) had the crazy idea of doing handstands on the glass! yikes!

Uh, no.... I don't do handstands - especially not 103 floors up looking down at the ground through glass! ha But I did face my fears and get out there long enough for this picture. :)

After the Willis Tower, we were trying to make our way to Oprah Winfrey's studio. One of our coaches, Nicole, is a big fan and really wanted to go to the "O" Store that was supposed to be next to the studio. The problem was, we had no idea how to get there. We had bus passes, but no directions. After talking to a cab driver we decided to try walking... fortunately, about that time, a man saw that we clearly looked like tourists from out of town and offered his assistance. He actually walked with us down to the right bus stop, got us on the right bus, rode with us, had the bus driver stop at a place where there wasn't even a bus stop, and walked us right down the street to Oprah's studio! :) He was very funny - and had quite a few stories along the way about Chicago, it's history, and all the corruption in it's government. haha. I wasn't quite sure at times if we were really going to get where we were going, or what we'd gotten ourselves into with our 'tour guide,' but he turned out to be a pretty genuine 'good samaritan' and I don't really think we would have made it to the "O" store without him! I was pretty impressed with the friendliness of people in Chicago - especially for a big city. You usually don't find that, so it was a nice blessing. :)

So it was a fun weekend - a good meet - a neat experience in a new city. I'm really proud of Anna and all the girls. It's just amazing what they can do with their gymnastics. And it's felt like a really, really long weekend now that we've had an extra snow day tacked onto an already 5 day weekend... I'm looking forward to getting back into a 'normal' routine tomorrow... and I hope to get back to my plan for posts that I started with at the beginning of the month!

One last thing - here's a video of Anna's floor routine: