Long trip to FLA

I flew home on the 11th to attend the high school swim banquet, which was tons of fun. It was great to celebrate a wonderful year. As soon as the banquet ended Alicia and I started a long drive, 1,301 miles to be exact! We decided since I was going to be in Florida for the next month it was smarter to drive a car down instead of renting one for $1,000. Honestly, how does it cost $1,000 for a rental car company to rent me a car for a month when the monthly payments on cars are $200-$400, but I digress. Anyways the trip down was long and well long. We stopped on Wednesday night at 3:30am in the small town of Laurel, MD just outside Washington DC for a short nights sleep.
We were up again at 9am and headed into DC to meet with the race director of the ITU DC World Championship Series Race. We got a quick tour of the course and it is spectacular. We swim in the Potomac and bike past the Washington Monument and past the Capital and Supreme Court buildings along the Mall. Honestly, it is a spectacular course in downtown DC, something I have never seen before. After the tour we drove to a pool and met up with the Mayor of DC, he is a great guy and we joined him and his swimming buddies for a quick swim. After chatting it up after the workout (I swam short and went for a 4 mile run), we were back on the road at 2pm, with an estimated ETA at Marc and Amy's house in Florida of 3:30am.
It was fun to see the Garmin ETA dropping slowly as we headed south. The best part about the trip from DC south is that there are NO cities on the highway after Richmond, VA. So when the directions said go 778 miles on I-95 it was very accurate. We stopped 3 times, 2 times for food and once at 1am because the car was sounding very loud. We had just had our muffler replaced and were afraid we were out of oil or the muffler had fallen off or something like that. We added more oil and limped into Winter Garden, FL at 3:30am.
After another short night of sleep I actually felt ok but we had to go get the car checked up on and pick Pam up at the airport at 9:15am. So we went to Meineke and got the diagnosis of a rusted out catlytic converter and it needed to be replaced. We picked Pam up, went back to Meineke and got it fixed.
So beyond that last week was a recovery week for me. I did a couple of shorter swims and bikes. I did a long run and a fartlek over the weekend.
On Monday we did a morning masters swim and headed to Disney for the day. It was nice to get a little change in the routine. Only problem was my ear started to hurt. Of course when I woke up on Tuesday morning it was much worse and after I did the track workout (which turned into a trail workout after the track ended up with 4 different college teams on it at 8:15am) I went to the Urgent Care Center and got the diagnosis of another outer ear infection! I am on anti-biotics now and will be fine within a few days... and I don't have to stop swimming.