Travel day (again)

Let me just say this about the Atlanta airport: it is like a fucking scavenger hunt. 

First, refill your gas tank and then drop off your car at the rental car center. Next, go up one escalator level and try to find the bathrooms secretly settled behind a corner with the world's most discrete sign while worrying (legitimately) that your bladder may burst. After emptying your bladder for over 1 straight minute, find the escalator to take you to the train that takes you to the airport. Once you've gotten off the train at the right stop, navigate your way towards the airport. Once at the airport, determine which terminal you need (north or south) and then find your airline check-in to print off a boarding pass, because with everyone on the Wifi, there is no way in hell the mobile boarding pass is going to cut it with loading times >1 minute. With paper boarding pass in hand, determine which security checkpoint you should enter (main, north, or assistance-required). Once through security, go down a majorly long and steep escalator and get on the plane train. Exit train at your terminal. Then find your gate. Once at your gate, wonder who the fuck thought this was a well-organized system. Then, given that you have 25 minutes and have used major phone battery navigating this world of fuckery, go buy a small hot chocolate (without whip cream magical calories) and use their outlets given that your gate (and the surrounding gates) have charging areas. 

Now, let me also say this: thank God I left early this morning. Yikes.

Alright. Now that I've given a thorough review on the Atlanta airport, I can announce that I'm in San Antonio. Tomorrow's interview starts rather late, which should be nice. It's also done at a reasonable time (around 4:30), so I can go check out the Alamo. It's only open until 5:30, so it might be a time crunch, but if worst comes to worst (I had to double check if that was the correct idiom), I can at least take a look at it from the outside. The River Walk is also supposed to be nice so my workout for tomorrow will be some walking, I think, which is good as this place lacks a fitness center (but does have free hot breakfast!).

Also, I ate pretty decently today. I ended up hitting up Subway before I left town and got a footlong because the breakfast menu was limited and none of the three options appealed to me. So, I ate half my turkey sub for lunch and half for breakfast. There's a subway just down the road from my hotel, so I'll likely do the same thing on Thursday when I head out to South Carolina - saves me some money if I don't buy it at the airport (and saves me from the temptation of anything too high calorie). I need to restock my South Beach diet bars though because I've gone through all five already (I left Sunday...) and they're great when I'm hungry and don't want to pay exorbitant airport prices for food. Like my small hot chocolate today was like $3.30. RIDICULOUS.

I did take some photos of my hotel room and my car windshield this morning (it had frosted over and I was at a loss as to what to do besides run the defroster given that I didn't have my snow brush/ice remover thing), but I'm being lazy and will post them tomorrow. Bed time for me!

Ballin' in the fitness center

This is going to have to be a relatively quick entry because I need to get to bed. But, today was an okay day food-wise. I decided to wake up at 9:00 a.m. because my body needed the recharge. Then I had a quick tea and South Beach diet bar to hold me over until lunch at 12:30ish.

As 12:30 approached, my stomach let me know that this teeny breakfast was not doing it. But I didn't want to pay $10 for the breakfast buffet, so I just went with it. Lunch was grilled teriyaki chicken, green beans, brown rice, and broccoli salad. It was pretty decent as lunches go. I was glad that it was relatively healthy. There was also a baby key lime pie that I tried that wasn't so great. 

When I got back to the hotel around 4/4:30ish, I needed to decompress so I started trolling the webs and watching The Hundred-Foot Journey. But it was loading really slow because I was using the free internet which was not meant for streaming. So, around 5:30, I decided to go drive around the city to get a feel for it and grab dinner. Because I'm in the south, it was clear that I was going to have to go to Chick-Fil-A. There is only one in Michigan and it's way too far from me, so I have to satisfy the craving while in the south. Now, it wasn't the healthiest thing I could have eaten, but I got the 3 count chicken strips (rather than the 4) and a small waffle fries (instead of the large) and didn't get a drink (instead of getting their to die for vanilla milkshake). When I'd eat it in North Carolina, I'd get the 4 count chicken strips meal with a medium vanilla milkshake. So: PROGRESS, BITCHES.

Dinner + hotel fruit granola bar for dessert

I finished the movie while eating and then hit up the fitness center like I promised myself. There was one lady in there who left quickly after I came so I had the place to myself. I watched Brooklyn 99 on my iPad and then turned on Biggest Loser during my 45 minutes of cardio. This is my usual set-up:

Then I did a little bit of weights, some triceps, and some ab stuff. It was nice having the place to myself because I haven't done tricep dips in forever and I wasn't sure I would even be able to do them. Nope. Totally could. I also did sit ups on a exercise ball, which I haven't done in forever. They're hard because you do more back extension than a normal sit-up but you have to make sure you're not cheating and just moving the ball. I could feel it by the end of my three sets. And lastly, I did some medicine ball slams where you do 30 seconds of slamming the medicine ball down as hard as you can so it bounces, catching it, and then switching to the other side. You get 30 seconds of rest between each set and do it 6 times. I'm usually dying by the end. All in all, it was a great workout. I got to try out a lot of things I haven't done in a while all because I was by my lonesome and would've been too embarrassed to do it public. Boo yeah.

25 lb weights cuz I'm a baller

Tomorrow I'm going to hit up a Subway on my way to the airport to buy a healthy and cheap lunch (and probably also a healthy breakfast) to keep things affordable instead of waiting until I'm in the airport.

And now, bed. I have to be up at 6:30 tomorrow to get on the road to return my rental car and get to my flight on time. Boarding starts at 10:10 a.m. and take off is 10:45. I'm headed to San Antonio for another interview. The chair of my department highly recommended the program, so I hope it's good!

Oopsies

Sorry about the lack of posts. It turns out that 10 minute layovers are not conducive to blogging and I should totally look at my flight schedule before promising things like legitimate blog entries. My bad. The good news is that I got home today around 3pm. The bad news is that I leave again tomorrow around 7am. It was totally worth coming home for a hot second though because it's always nice to do laundry (since I'm basically wearing the same things) and to sleep in my own bed. 

My last two interviews were interesting. Not interesting good, not interesting bad. Just interesting. I think that I've become very used to the midwest culture so it's always interesting to take a look at programs outside of this area. I was in Tennessee and Arizona. Tomorrow I'm hitting up Georgia and will be going to Texas and South Carolina during the rest of the week. Should be fun...ish. I can tell you that I thought I loved traveling, but what I meant was being at the destination, not doing the actual airport/airplane thing. And renting cars is not as cool as you'd think. And living out of a carry-on is also not that ideal. But it's only temporary! And it's all for a good reason!

The other bad thing about traveling is my eating. And when I say bad, I mean bad. Really, really bad. Yikes. There is food everywhere (but on American Airlines' flights...why no pretzels!?) and there are so many options and I have to have it all. I've spent a ridiculous amount on food and consumed a lot  of calories lately. So, since I'm heading out again tomorrow, I've thought up a plan of attack for making sure this stops. It's pretty easy: continue counting calories. Most of the places I went had calorie counts on their menus, so I can't just say that because I'm traveling it doesn't count. I've gotta make smart choices all the time. And I did okay about exercising while traveling, but since I'm giving myself about a day in-between interviews, I know I can probably get in a solid workout everyday. I can also blog a bit more.

So, this next week, these are the goals I'm working on:

1. Calorie counting (I use the SparkPeople app)
2. Good workouts
3. Being conscious about moving while waiting for flights (tomorrow I've got like two hours in Chicago - I could totally walk around for most of that)
4. Taking ALL THE PHOTOS! Seriously. I used to document everything. I'm going to be obnoxious and do that again.

That's it. Four goals is enough for one week. 

Cheers!