Off to New Adventures!

Getting ready to head off to Dubai, United Arab Emirates. I will be staffing a booth at the Arab Health Conference MedLab section of the exhibits. I hope all goes well, both in travels and with getting the exhibition materials ready. I'm supposed to be getting the stuff by Sunday to set up the booth. The weekend in the UAE is actually Friday and Saturday, so Sunday is a work day. Interestingly, St. Mary's, the Roman Catholic church there has a full schedule of services Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. The ones on Friday seem to be in a variety of Middle Eastern languages, but the ones on Sat. and Sun. are mainly in English. So, I'm going to try to get to the 9am Mass on Sunday if possible. I arrive in Dubai on Sat. evening at around 7pm. So, getting to church will be my first adventure and then I'll head over to the Convention Center.

On the bike racing front, the Tour Down Under is underway in Adelaide, Australia. It is Lance Armstrong's first race back. He is racing for the Astana team. He is doing pretty good...able to keep up with the other pros and he's not even the oldest racer in the peloton. Jens Voigt (Saxo Bank) is one day older than him! He was in a break with the other major players the other day and it was nice to see. He is doing double duty besides, he has a whole host of Livestrong (Lance Armstrong Foundation) events that he's been attending besides just racing. I don't know how he does it. Of course, he's also in demand at the start line for autographs, etc. I think he's going to have to stretch it out some at other events otherwise he'll burn out before the Giro (Tour of Italy), much less the Tour de France in July. I think this pace is primarily because of the limited time he has in Australia and they are launching a whole lot of new initiatives and partnering with a lot of cancer organizations there. That was part of his reason for coming back to racing. It gets him a lot more publicity if he is an active racer and he can piggyback his activities with Livestrong onto an already very popular event, like the Tour Down Under.

Next month, he'll be in the Tour of California. That should be something to see. Carlos Sastre (Cervelo Test Team), last year's TDF winner will be there as will Ivan Basso (Liquigas), who is coming off his suspension for "attempting" to dope (long story...). Ivan had been one of Lance's main rivals the last couple of TDF's that he raced. Going to be a great season!

Well enough rambling for now...I'll try to update from Dubai. I think I should be able to because I should have internet in the hotel. This is a new one, it just opened in October 2008.