Pink doncha think?

Today's the day that the new and improved (from when I did it back in 2002) San Diego 3 day breast cancer walk goes from OB to East Village & Petco Park.

The theme for the day seemed to be pink and even the trees knew to strut their stuff and show support to the walkers.

I'd already done my homework and knew that the last cheering station location was by the bridge across Park Boulevard.

It was a good thing that I'd hit the web for info the day before because I was internet-less for most of the day as Cox Communications internet network outage put a real crimp in my plans.

That outage delayed my out the door start, and while I was glad to have confirmation that it was their system not mine, I was still looking at 100% packet loss on pings to my gateway.

The tech guys suggested that there were multiple problems (I'd seen first sync problems in the wee hours) across the network and no estimated time of correction. Really bad news when I'm feeling very blogg-ish.

Even with the sleep in (hey, I went to bed at 3am and was up by 10) and a sanity check to ISP, my out the door was early enough to make the Farmer's Market. So, after a tuck up the knitting a toss a coin about route, I went up the alley and right on University away from the park.

So while my ISP network was down the social network was up and strong.

Although I have many friends, co-workers, acquaintances, and the like who have done this walk over the years, I have yet to run into any of them during the course of the walk with the exception of the wonderful Luis Leon who, like me, wasn't walking that year but just happened to be in Hillcrest on the weekend of the walk.

So imagine my surprise when I'm less than two blocks on my way when I walk directly into the only team I sponsored this year. I got a hello, a hug and a thank you -- it was an unexpected and lovely moment. I, of course, gave back the stock issue encouraging words and hug or two of my own.

When I did the walk, the hardest part for me was the fund raising. I've never forgotten that a virtual stranger, fellow knitter and veteran of the event, wrote one of my biggest cheques and made the event possible for me.

In the years since I've done what I could, as I could, to make this walk happen for others. Sometimes what's been required is money, sometimes training, sometimes just emotional support and brainstorming.

I was, of course, knitting and while I heard some "knitter" shout outs, I didn't see any of my fellow knitter/3-dayers and there was just too much pink as I was feeling like a salmon swimming upstream.

There was a bit of a sprinkle thing starting as I passed the fire station so after I tapped the ATM, I paralleled the walkers' route by taking Robinson back home to check the network ping status and grab a rain jacket.

With no joy on the network status, I headed back out going down Park Boulevard. I was on the North side of the street until the bridge by the rose garden when I crossed over and continued down to President's Way and into the park.

Park and President's Way was porta-potty central and no coverage/discussion of the 3 day walk would be complete without a porta potty moment -- trust me.

I stopped into the Mingei, Old Globe and Museum of Man shops before crossing the bridge out to 6th. As I was walking along 5th, I ran into yet another Shakespeare related friend -- crazy coincidence.

Before rolling home, veered off to stop in at the Von's on the Mission Hills/Hillcrest border. I did manage to briefly lose a knitting needle that suffered a shopping cart incident while separated from the fold.

Before heading out, I set up both recently purchased step counter/pedometers. The two differ in their count by -- big surprise -- but the difference is not huge. Between their counts and g-maps pedometer I logged about 10.5 miles on the day. And I did it while wearing flip flops & knitting.