Stars, Stripes, and Snow

 Last weekend we were in Erie, PA for the Stars and Stripes meet.  It's in a convention center which is directly attached to the two hotels, which is nice. James had a good meet, with an especially excellent rings routine (with a score of 11.2). 

James placed 2nd on rings, 5th on floor (9.40), 4th on parallel bars (9.1) and 6th all-around for his age group. 

After the meet, James tried the "hangman challenge" -- hanging for two minutes on a bar. Normally that would be easy for him, but this bar spins and you're not allowed to use a mixed grip (one hand facing one way and the other hand facing the other way).  He made it 42 seconds, which was a very good effort, but didn't win a prize. Of course, nobody had won the prize all day, so it's not too surprising! (I admit that I thought he might be able to do it, since he has such great grip strength from all his ninja stuff!) Matthew tried as well and had a respectable 25 seconds. 

There was a winter storm warning that day, so we were a bit concerned about the ride home, but it turned out to be fine -- there wasn't much traffic on the freeway (trucks were banned because of the potential storm) and they had it plowed well.