Day 3 - August 21, 2008

The day started off in a torrential downpour. We were lucky enough to have a great tour guide who found us some handy rain ponchos. After long walks, a short subway ride and trekking through inches of water, we finally made it to the Bird's Nest and got to see the torch.

Kinley thinks she is such a big girl on the subway.



Here is the bird's nest as we first saw it. Remember its only 9:00am and its raining cats and dogs.



Tom running the 100m. Little bit wet in this one.




We just made it inside for the first heat of the 100m. I think Tom was in the second or third heat. He got out great and about 75m into the race it looked like he shut it down. After a few seconds, the jumbo-tron showed Tom running slo-mo from the front, and it became apparent after some careful lip reading that something was wrong. I immediately got hold of Coach Rovelto and we went to see what was going on. To make a long story short, Tom ended up withdrawing from the competiton after his first long jump. He has an MRI on Saturday to see if he has indeed torn his plantar fascia (same thing, different foot as Athens).

We all left the stadium together and headed back to our hotel. Being the people that we are, we had to make an important stop on the way home - McDonald's. So the interesting thing here was you could get fries or a cup of corn, no diet drinks, no barbeque sauce, and my hamburger had cucumbers instead of pickles and some kind of spicy mayo-type dressing on it. Granted, I didn't exactly know what I was ordering, but still a bit of a surprise.

We all rested up for a while at the hotel and some of our group decided to go back to the track to watch the men's 400m final. They said Tony Blair was sitting behind them - wow! After a little journey to the Olympic Village, we turned in for the night with pretty heavy hearts.