Mary’s Pad

Today we finally conquered the Kelly Dr Loop. We walked the entire 8.56 miles of the loop, and then some.

View of the river just past Boat House Row, at 6:30am

As usual, we started off at the Art Museum, but today we did the early bird thing and set off at 6:30am. The weather was perfect, nice and cool, and for at least 6 miles of the walk we were in the shade with a nice breeze, which helped a lot. We got to the East Falls Bridge, which is the approximate halfway point, and pretty exciting:

The welcome sign to East Falls, just before Falls Bridge

On Falls Bridge

On Falls Bridge

We kept a pretty steady pace, except for stopping to drink water and take pictures, and got back to the car at 9:00am, covering the 9 miles in 2.5 hours.

Some cool stuff that was going on the park today was the Philadelphia Triathlon Sprint race, the Olympic race being tomorrow. The race involves swimming, biking, and running. There were lots of people, and believe it or not, the contestants actually swim in the Schuylkill River!! I don’t even want to think about all the GI stuff you can get swimming in there. We talked to someone who’s friend was one of the contestants, and she told us that she had been taking prophylactic antibiotics and was swimming in a full skin suit. Still… eeww!

It was wonderful to actually walk the whole loop, and even though my legs and back hurt like crazy and I’m detesting our three-story house right now, it was an unbelievably rewarding experience for me.

On West River Drive “the other side of the loop”