A Life More Complete: Mardi Gras and lots of Food & Wine!!

Kris: This past weekend was a busy, fun weekend again starting with our Geocaching Mardi Gras party put on by our geocaching friends NOSNOW and Shadow's Friend. It was so much fun to catch up with a number of our friends since I don't think we've been out to an event since our "Eat, Greet and Meet the Newlyweds" event back in December. I was a little concerned we were going to have to show up at this Mardi Gras event without masks but thanks to a trip through the $1 aisle at Target the night before, we were all set :) Mark: Kris forgot to mention that our $1 aisle masks also earned us each a Mardi Gras geocoin.

Kris: Sunday morning was a morning of running and classes again at Life Time for me. I could only run 6 miles and Mark was doing 12 so we ran his first 6 together on the trail from the St. Louis Park Life Time Fitness towards downtown and back and then while he finished his second 6 miles, I went in to a Barbell Strength class. While I still get cranky about not being able to feel like I'm on a "real" marathon training schedule yet, I have really enjoyed being able to get in a run plus a class or two at the club on Sunday mornings. Pace is actually doing fairly well, I've been able to keep all my runs below a 9:00min/mi pace. The knee was a little achy after we were done working out but no pain during the run :) Mark: After the first six miles with Kris I grabbed her Garmin and headed back down the trail torwards downtown, when I got to Cedar Lake the time I turned and followed the trail doen to Lake Calhoun, and then over to Lake of the Isles and back to Cedar Lake on the way back to the club. It was supposed to be 6 miles according to the map at LTF but I made a wrong turn and it ended up being 7 miles. So being me, I had to run a little more, .1 and run a half marthon just for fun. What was fun was finally having HR information for a run. My average HR for 7.12 miles was 149bpm with a high of 162bpm and that was at a 7:57 average pace. Not sure what to make of that but it is interesting.

Kris: And it was probably a really good thing that we had our longer workout on Sunday morning since that afternoon we were headed to the Food and Wine Show. I was so excited when I won two tickets for us to go to the show through a Twitter contest from Minnesota Monthly Magazine (thank you!!) The two tickets were worth $150 total. Mark: Kris wins countless things via Twitter contests, while we were at the show, Urban Eatery mentioned they had a chance to win a $25 Gift card. Guess who won? Today Kris also happen to win tickets to the Pet Expo this coming weekend.

Kris: Luckily they had a number of food items in between the wine samples because I probably had the equivalent of 4 glasses of wine. But my downfall I think was that I was so hungry coming in to the show, I ate too many larger samples so that by time we were half way through the show, we were starting to share our samplings! Mark: We ate so much, not only were we sharing the second half of the show, we were being picky about what samples we were eating. My tummy HURT for all the food.

Kris: At first I was having trouble holding on to my bag of coupons, my glass of wine, whatever the current sample was AND a fork. But I made a very helpful discovery. A lot of the samples came in a cup that fit in the top of my wine glass. So I started having fun with that......

Bloody Mary | Curried Rice with Chicken

A little coffee | Cole Slaw

And the napkins were thick enough to form a plate for my bruschetta | Turkey Chili

Mushroom Dessert (...it was ok) | Caramel Puff Corn

Baked Beans

And one of my favorite sections to go through had a huge line of cheese vendors. I can't even tell you how many different cheese there were. Everything from bleus to bries to new cheddar, old cheddar, smoked gouda....yum!!! Here's a few looking down the one line of cheese samples:

And Mark gave me a bit of insight that really paid off. He has worked at this show before and learned many of the vendors hand stuff out at the end of the last day. Basically so they don't have to drag it back home. With about 15 minutes left in the show, we started to double back on all the booths to see if anyone was giving stuff out. OMG did we come home with a stash!

We spent $5.00 to park, $2.00 to check our coats and ended up coming home with all this....