Immediately after school on Friday, being all packed and ready to go we, all piled in the vehicle and headed to Wisconsin Dells for a rare Friday night gymnastics meet. As you might guess, it was Clare who competed with her Madtown Twisters team at the big puffy dome on the Chula Vista resort grounds.
(Regarding the venue, allow me to rant for just a minute…$12 a head to watch our kids compete?!?! That’s outrageous. I’ve never seen anything more than $5-6 per adult. Plus another $5 to park. Super. Yes, it’s a beautiful, multi-use facility that has to be a huge pain to swap to different sports. But each gym pays an entrance fee plus each gymnast pays a fee to compete. Give me a break! A recent multi-day volleyball tournament had free parking and was maybe $5/day to get in.)
Getting back to the event at hand, here’s her beam routine:
[youtube 1HqWY75Yu6Q]
In the video, you begin to get a sense for how large this place is. Two complete gym setups for girls plus another for boys, a separate area for awards, and additional warm-up areas for each event in each setup.
All in all, it was a pretty good meet for Clare. Two places (6th on beam and 15th on vault), plus a good showing in the all-around (13th).
Since awards ran past 10:00 p.m. (pretty much as planned), we decided to spend the night in town and enjoy the wintery sights the next day. Most of us slept in on Saturday, and Clare and a teammate got in the pool/water park before we checked out. We spent most of the day at the Tanger outlet mall and found some good deals on just about everything. The girls were fortunate to catch us in a giving mood.
Lunch at the Cheese Factory (vegetarian), then we headed home. The greatest part about rushing out and getting everything started early was that by now the weekend was only half over! Spent a lot of time sitting and waiting (at the meet, shopping), but it was good that it didn’t eat up the entire weekend.
Good family bonding, much fun had by all.