I'm finally feeling much better. I still have a little cough. I still have some runny nose. But it's all manageable and my energy is good.

Thursday afternoon I went for a bike ride. The weather was wonderful. I just did a short 40 min loop around the south end of the island, but it was a start.

Friday I hiked with Dave in the afternoon. He had some other trails near his house to show. I've been neglecting to take my camera, so there's nothing to show for it. We went to the old rock quarry and did another segment behind his house.

In the evening, I introduced Suka to Indian food. There is really only one Indian restaurant on island. The owners were really nice. I was asking about their paneer. The don't go through enough of it to make the real thing, so they usually use tofu instead. However, he volunteered to make some real paneer if I call a day ahead of time. The lamb masala was pretty good. The chicken khorma was a little disappointing. I think next time we go I'll ask him to make mutter paneer.

After that we went to the first annual Saipan International Blues Festival at Porky's Beach Bar. Porky's is where we've been having the Marianas Dive meetings. I've also run into Bruce, the owner, at Java Joe's a few times. The band was okay. It was an aggregate of a bunch of musicians from Saipan, Guam, Palau, and Hawaii. It was a nice way to chill out and watch people. There's always quite a mix in Saipan. And on a Friday night, you get the sailors from the boats, as well. The guy behind us was a merchant marine out of Hawaii. One of the Hashers from the boats also showed up and was his usual outgoing self. You should have seen how fast he made it to the door to invite some beautiful Chinese girls to their table for a drink when they came in. If it were an Olympic sport, ....

This morning Dave and I volunteered to help run the Tough Love II bike race. It's a mountain bike race from the Micro Beach pavilion to the top of Mt. Topachao. It's about a 1500' net climb over some pretty steep roads, the end entirely rutted dirt. Dave and I were the press car. I had the organizer's camera. The sports and photo people from the Saipan Tribune and the Marianas Variety rode with us. We only got to photograph the last three people at the finish, though, because we ran into a hill and road that was so bad Dave's car couldn't handle it. We had to turn around and take an alternate route to the finish that got us there much later. The winner (who was 2nd place in the Hell of the Marianas) did it in 34:36. The guy who won the Hell of the Marianas and was expected to win this didn't show because he crashed practicing for it yesterday.

After we were done with that (8:30, the start was at 7 and we had to be there at 6), Dave and I took the kids on a mini-Hash. It was really rainy, so we didn't do the whole trail, but there was some really cool scenery. We went down predominantly a river ravine on the east side of the island. There were some interesting caves and some huge trees growing out of the rocks.