Another Great Day Off

Caen and the French hockey federation has done a great job promoting this tournament.  Attendance at all of games has been decent, but last night the game was played in front of a completely sold out arena (approximately 1400 people) which was very cool.  The game was also being broadcast throughout France which was pretty cool, especially since the French played well and won.  After the game we went to a small pizza and pasta restaurant with the IIHF chairman, Frederick.  It was a lot of fun and the food was a nice change from what we have been eating here at the hotel.  After eating pizza and drinking beer, we were absolutely stuffed and went right to bed.

This morning Katie and I decided we should go for a run since it was an off day.  She is running a marathon the same day I am doing the Broad Street Run (10 miler) and we both have been saying how this tournament has not been the best thing for our training!  While we are definitely working hard physically, we haven't run a whole lot and worse yet, we have been eating a ton!  We left the hotel with the intention of finding this river in town that has a nice running trail along side of it but for the life of us we couldn't find it! We ended up just running around all around different parts of the city looking for the trail for just under an hour.  It was kind of fun to explore that way, although we both said afterwards we couldn't retrace our path if we tried nor did we know just how far we ran!  It felt good though, and hopefully that will help keep me in at least a little better running shape.  

After our run we had breakfast and our daily meeting to review the previous nights games.  We then had the rest of the day off to go do some more touring.  We visited two French tourist cities nearby, Honfleur and Deauville.  Honfleur was a cute little port town with a ton of cafes along the water.  We all walked around for a bit and checked out a few of the shops.  After Honfleur, we headed to Deauville.  Deauville is apparently a town for the rich and famous where a number of movies have been filmed.  It is right along the beach and reminded me of a mix between Atlantic City, Stone Harbor and Cape May.  The city portion had this huge casino hotel that was absolutely gorgeous.  They also had a ton of very high end designer shops.  We were walking around and saw one store that had a big clearance sign so we decided that maybe they might have some items in our price range.  After we saw a handbag that was on sale for 2900 euros (marked down from 9000) we decided this wasn't the right spot for us. :-)  We then walked down along what they consider to be the boardwalk and had some ice cream.  Along this boardwalk there were little storage lockers that had a number of famous actors names on them.  Apparently the rich and famous would rent or purchase these stalls when they were in town filming a movie.  Some of the names we saw included Matt Damon, Harrison Ford, Jack Nicholas, and Buzz Aldrin.  Again, the weather was gorgeous so it was the perfect day for a lot of walking outside. 

After spending a few hours in Deauville we headed back to the hotel for dinner.  Coincidentally, on the way back to the hotel we came into town from a different direction and drove right by the river with the running trail, haha.  Today was Anu's birthday so we surprised her at dinner with a birthday cake and a few small gifts.  Tomorrow games start up again but because it is the weekend the first game is at 5 instead of 1:30.  Since we have all morning free we are going to visit some of the famous sites here in Caen, including a huge castle that is in the center of the city.  I'm working the late game tomorrow night with France vs. Great Britain.  Hopefully there will be another big crowd on hand for that one!  Goodnight!