Monaco went really great! We meet up with some other USA swimmers including Leila Vaziri (one of my absolute favorite national team members) and Dara Torres. I won both the 100 (1.07.6) and the 50 breaststroke (30.83) and I didn’t have to swim the 200. There was a different format for the 50s this time so we swam it five times, which is why I didn’t swim the 200. The first swim was to narrow the field to 16 competitors (although there were only 11 of us we still had to swim it, we just all went slow since we knew no one would be cut), the rest of the swims divided the number of the competitors in half each time. At the end it came down to just me vs. one of the Aussies. I won with a best time - yay! I really needed to swim fast on the last night because Sohpie Eddington from Australia was gaining on me in the FINA point competition. We were taking our best FINA point swim from every competition and then adding them all together so see who got the highest amount. It was fortunate that I did swim fast because the win was worth a lot of money.

After the meet we all went to a gala for the swimmers. It was fun but we were disappointed that Prince Albert (the prince of Monaco) wasn’t there like we heard that he usually is. Whatever, we didn’t need him to have fun - we danced around a lot, had a great time, and took a lot of cute pics. Then we went to the casino to check that out. Since I had won the competition I got a round of champagne for everyone to celebrate and we toasted to the funny way my name was announced at these competitions. We left the casino after a little while. It was fun to see but since none of us is really rich, gambling wasn’t going to be entertaining for long. Everyone, including a few of the Aussies, went to a place just down the road. Then Natalie and I decided that we were starving and really, really wanted some pizza. So we started walking in the direction of our hotel looking for an open pizza place.

How many people can say that they have walked across most of a country in bare feet/high heels? Well, Natalie and I can. I think that we must have walked for a couple of hours — so several miles (and she walks really fast even if her feet are blistered and bloody). Monaco is only about two square miles so I figure we covered most of it in a pretty round-about manner. About halfway through we did find a pizza place, which was key. Natalie made a documentary along the way that is pretty funny.

The whole walk was a totally surreal experience since it was about 2:30 a.m. on Sunday night/Monday morning and absolutely no one was around. We did run into two Russian and Ukrainian swimmers on a teeter-totter. Then we ran into the same Russian about half an hour later going into the hotel. She had probably just gotten off the teeter-totter and was wondering what we had been doing all that time. Also, I thought that it was funny that by the time we made it back to the hotel, I was covered in soot from walking through the tunnels there (I’ve included a picture from the walk but before the soot encounter). I’m sure that the hotel staff thought that we were crazy. It was a great adventure but now that I look back, probably not one of the brightest things that Natalie and I have ever done considering we both won significant prize money at the Gala and it was all in Euros. Oh well, at least nothing bad did happen and now we have a great story to tell.

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