After returning home from our ‘bitter / sweet’ trip to Hawaii and Florida, sweet in that Chris had a great swim across the Molokai Channel (his story is posted below), and not so sweet for me having to end my crossing after swimming 60 kilometres in 12 hours due to extremely ill effects from painful Man-of-War jellyfish stings.
The email below sums it up nicely,
“Thanks to the marvels of modern technology I was able to follow your challenging adventures in real time from the wilds of South Central Idaho.
I was able to relate to three aspects of your efforts
The satisfaction of completing the Kaiwi Channel
The miserable and debilitating pain inflicted by jellyfish
The disappointment of not completing what one set out to do
I salute both of your valiant effort”
Harry
From Hawaii we went on to Florida for my induction into The International Marathon Swimming Hall of Fame (IMSHOF), such a proud, humbling and wonderful weekend we had in Fort Lauderdale.
Thank you to Dan Boyle and Brooke Bessert who flew down from New York to join us and thank you Ned Denison who travelled all the way from Ireland to share this special occasion with us. Dan, Brooke and Ned are just a few of the wonderful friends who have helped us along the way that makes this sport so special to me. Also a big thank you to everyone involved in the International Swimming Hall of Fame (ISHOF) and IMSHOF for putting together a fabulous weekend for all the nominees and their guests.
This is proving to be a busy time for us as we make the quick turnaround in preparation for a trip to Europe in just a weeks time with the intention of visiting my (Penny’s) mother and step father who live in Portugal with a quick side trip to Tarifa in southern Spain to meet up with our New York friends Dan and Brooke and squeeze in ‘a bit of a dip’ across the Strait of Gibraltar, hopefully the windy straits will be kind and give us the opportunity to swim from Spain to Morocco.
This trip is closer than we would normally plan our overseas trips but we had already made the bookings before we learned about my induction into IMSHOF so delayed our Hawaii trip to enable us to attend the ceremonies.
So here we are, doing the big catch up and get ready for our next trip all at the same time. We’re very much looking forward to it and hope the ash cloud over Europe doesn’t disrupt our flights too much.