We are back in Florida again – this time we’re running the Wine and Dine Half Marathon as well as enjoying Epcot’s Food and Wine Festival, which is one of our favorite annual events.

It’s the final weekend of the Food and Wine Festival – it ends on Monday. I’ll have a lot more to say about what we tried and what we did later, but for now I’ll be writing more about the events associated with the race. I’ve been tweeting, though, so you can follow along with @AllEarsLaura.

This is a nighttime race – it starts Saturday at 10:00 p.m at Disney’s Wide World of Sports. It goes through three of the four theme parks: Animal Kingdom, Disney’s Hollywood Studios, then ends at Epcot. Following the race there’s a party in World Showcase, where we’ll be able to enjoy the Food and Wine Festival booths until 4:00 a.m.! (Though I don’t expect we will be there that long!)

For once being from the west coast works in our favor, since it’s only 7:00 p.m. for us, and we’re trying to stay on west coast time in the days leading up to the race.

Our first “race event” was a short training run with our fellow Team AllEars member Mike on Thursday night. We started from the lobby of the Beach Club around 9:30 and ran towards the Studios. There was a special fireworks show going on at the Studios, and we were able to watch it as we were running! It was really cool! Thanks Mike for suggesting the run, and also for this photo.

Friday morning we went to the Expo at Wide World of Sports to pick up our race registration packets. We arrived before they opened, so there was a pretty long line of people waiting to get in the building. Once they opened things moved along pretty well.

There’s usually some fun photo ops at the Expo…Lee seems pretty unconcerned about the fire-breathing dragon behind him…

As usual, packet pickup was in one building, and the race expo was in another. More photo ops… 🙂

Most of the usual expo-type vendors – apparel, running gear, nutrition, etc. I thought Disney had a nice selection of official merchandise, though there were more choices for women than men.

We picked up our “goodie bags” and running shirts. In the interest of saving paper most races have gone to a “virtual” goodie bag these days where the various coupons and flyers are available on-line instead of put in the bag. But I miss the free samples of energy bars and other things that used to be in the bags…This year’s shirt is long-sleeved and green, which seemed an odd choice to me. And I don’t know why Disney insists on giving us long-sleeve shirts – these are also the heavier weight tech fabric that I don’t care for. Oh well.

We met up with a few of the members of Team AllEars, too!

One of the best parts of the Expo was signing up for the Princess Half Marathon next year! This will be the 5th one, and there’s a new medal. I did the Inaugural with my Evil Twin in 2009, and I really wanted to do the 5th one but Lee wasn’t so sure he could get away from work. But I talked him into it, and I think my Evil Twin is going to run it with me again, too! The medal is sooooo pretty! (And you all know how much I love bling!) By signing up at the Expo I got a nice runDisney bag, too. You can see that HERE.

We’ve been having fun – I’m looking forward to the race tomorrow night!

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