Tough Mudder- Allentown, PA

So I'd like to take a little break this week from my road trip and share my short road trip experience to Allentown this past weekend. I signed up for a challenge called the toughmudder several months ago. This one in paticular was an 11 mile race with 18 grueling obstacles on Bear Creek Mountain (which is a ski/snowboard resort). According to mapquest the trip would take a little over 3 hours. I was running the race with a long time friend of mine but had informed him ahead of time I wanted to drive myself. My cross country trip taught me that sometimes when your going to spend a decent amount of time with friends certain components of the trip are better off being done solo. Personally I like driving, I also smoke which he does not, and have to pee usually once an hour. Instead of either of us getting annoyed at the other we should go the trip alone. I arrived at the mountain around 1pm and was able to watch the race for a few hours and was in time to see a few friends finish the race.

 My friend Ryan had booked a room about 2 months in advance at a Best Western, I had told him I wasn't sure if I'd being staying there or not with him. When I did finally leave the mountain and attempted to find this hotel I got lost for about 2 hours. This is where I realized just how much I missed having a travel buddy! It's extremely hard to navigate yourself without a navigation system, in a strange city while driving stick shift. Upon my arrival to the Best Western myself and Ryan realized he'd booked the wrong hotel and he was about an hour away! At that point I decided to call hotels.com and see what they had to offer. The woman on the phone told me she only had a room at a hotel I've never heard of and had no idea where it was located. So I decided to call the Red Roof Inn where my other 2 friends that had just ran the race were staying. Jackpot! Not only did she have a room available with a king sized bed for 70 dollars but apparently I was only an exit away and driving in the right direction. Within 10 mins the room was booked and I was walking to a restaurant with my buddies to get dinner. While lost though I realized how many things were within reasonable driving distance, I'd circled Dorney Park numerous times, Hershey Park seemed relatively simple to get to as there were signs everywhere, and of course I had just left Bear Creek Mountain where you could obviously ski and snowboard as well as the spa that was on site. Once I arrived to the Red Roof Inn the hotel itself wasn't too shabby. My room was clean and the woman at the front desk was really nice and helpful. It was a stones throw off the parkway and there were numerous places to eat within walking distance. Across the parking lot were a few franchises like Applebees, Denny's, and TGIFridays,and  Dunkin Donuts was literally in the middle of the parking lot. There was also a strip of stores right there that came in handy as I'd forgotten toothpaste, shampoo and other numerous important things normal people pack first. So all in all Allentown wasn't so bad, there's a quite a few things around there for familys or individuals... And if you want to abuse test your physical and mental strength to the max, check out toughmudder.com to see when next years Allentown race will be.

Lauren