Only one more day...

On Thursday of last week we had our final practice before competing at regions. We were going to be competing at the Iowa State Fair Grounds in Des Moines. That Thursday morning we had to be at the gym by 8 a.m., which was not fun at all. We had to get up at 6:30 in order to have breakfast and have enough time to get and then find the place. Getting up that early was a little hard after not getting to Des Moines until almost midnight. The hotel didn't have a continental breakfast but fortunately it did have a restaurant right there, so we ate there. After we ate we finished getting ready and headed out to find the fair grounds. Once we got to the building where all the magic would happen we started warming up. After we got stretched and ready to go we started on bars in the practice gym. You may be wondering what I mean by a practice gym, well let me explain. When you go to a big meet like this you have two gyms. One is the gym where you will, when you compete, warm up all of your skills to get ready to compete: the practice gym. This also means that there are two sets of each event. The other gym is the competition gym, obviously where you will be doing to the competing for the judges. I hope that you understand this now. We continued in this way going from practice gym to competition gym. The only thing different about the two gyms is that in the competition gym you had to time the event. This means that when your on a certain event you get two minutes per gymnast to warm up, so if you have say, six girls, you would get twelve minutes to warm up on that event. In the practice gym however you got as much time as you wanted on the apparatus. After we were doing there, at 11:00, we decided to go to the mall. Before we went to the mall, though, we stopped by KFC to get something to eat! The food was delicious and the mall was pretty fun. At the mall I got some flip-flops to wear during that dance at the prom I was going to in Wilmot on Saturday. After we did all the shopping we went back to the hotel to get ready to go to the Macaroni Grill, just a fancy name for another Italian restaurant much like Johnny Carinos. Everyone that qualified for regions in South Dakota was invited to come eat at the Macaronis grill as a way to go for making it. The food was good and after eating there we went back to the hotel to settle in for the night.