THE END!

We had a great end to our meet last night!  We started off the night with Sarah in the 200 free, she went in 10th and came out 5th!  She swam a best time too!  That was the first 5 'steps' of our night!

Next up we had Peter, who with luck on his side again, made it into the B final after qualifying 16th in the youth section...late scratch, another swim!  He moved up 2 steps and improved his time from the morning by over 2 seconds.

Then came the 50 back, whose prelims were swum on Thursday.  Heidi went in 6th and came out 4th...2 more steps!

Heidi was then up again in the 100 fly and ended up DOUBLING our medal count for the meet! :)

She went in 3rd and came out 3rd...oh well, no steps but another BRONZE medal for her collection.

This time she got to get on the podium to get the medal.  

 I was even able to get a picture of Miss Saskatoon this time, check out the shoes. 

  Sarah was then up again in the 800 free, she went in 5th and came out 5th but had a great 5 second best time!!  Stefan got to swim in the night heat of the 1500, struggled a bit but scored us some valuable points.  Finn was our last individual swimmer of the meet and swam in the youth final of the 1500.  He went out a little slow but battled back and ended up 7th in the race.  Not a best time, but as he said,  a good swim considering how his others had gone over the weekend.  More points!!

Last up were the relays...once again the girls were dealing with an entry time glitch and had to swim in the outside lane in heat 1 of 4!!  They went in DEAD LAST with a time of 4:44!

Amazingly, they won the heat and swam 4:26.10.  Our team was:  Chloe, Lauren, Heidi and Sarah, they ended up 15th overall.  So...22 steps!

The boys:  Peter, Finn, Sam and Kurt were very proud of the fact that they didn't really come dead last as there were 2 DQ's!!

We ended up 18th out of 55 teams.

Not bad with such a small, inexperienced team!

Once the boys were done, we couldn't get out of the pool fast enough.  Cindy was crying(I think she wanted to stay in Saskatoon) from the terrible air quality.  Her eyes didn't stop watering until this  morning!

I hope everyone's coughs will be gone by the time we get back to our lovely moist air!

Waiting politely for our table!

I booked us dinner at Boston Pizza and, with the help of Siri, we navigated through blowing snow to our only meal out.

Unfortunately, Molly left early so I never did get a compete team picture.

I think Finn will be auditioning for the next vampire movie.

They had a lot of fun figuring out how to get everything they wanted to eat while staying within their $20 budget!  They did a very good job by sharing appies. 
Finn learned a lot about sharing this week...he was always wanting to 'share' a cookie with someone.  That is because they were allowed one, unless they could share another half with someone else!



We all had to scatter early this morning as we are on a total of 5 different flights today!  Cindy and I left with Sam and JO while the rest of the kids are making their way to the airport throughout the day.  Right now we are in Calgary for a little 3 hour layover!

I don't know about everyone else, but I enjoyed my first experience with a prairie winter.  The cold was not TOO cold, probably because we picked the best week, since 2 weeks ago it was -42º and all this week  it is going to be highs of -15º!

The only thing I regret (I didn't know I regretted it until I bought this postcard for Christl in the airport) is that we never saw anything of the city...I didn't even know there was a river!  Supposedly this is what it looks like.  We drove from the airport to the hotel, 2 minutes, to the pool, 6 minutes.  Even the grocery store was on the way to the pool so no big adventuring there.  I was lucky since I got to go a little further when I went to Costco!

Well, that's it from me!  I hope people were actually reading this and found it somewhat interesting.
~Karen
(Thank you to: Sam, JO, Kurt, Peter, Sarah, Chloe, Lauren, Molly, Stef, Heidi and Finn for making my job incredibly easy.  Special thanks to Peter who always asked me if I needed help with carrying/packing things! And to Sam, who helped me get my big cooler to be under 70 pounds this morning.  And to Cindy for being a great roomie.)