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Great achievement of the weekend: waking up at 6am to make our 9am flight to Cebu. And we still nearly missed the flight because the queue at NAIA 2 at 7:30am looked like this:

We made it, but didn’t have time for our favorite pre-domestic flight ritual: breakfast at Kaya Toast. Tried to get take-out but the cashier said it would take 15 minutes. Ended up inhaling a cold latte on the walk to the gate.

We were covering the Vaseline Men XTerra triathlon for our Wide World of Pain sports column in Esquire (We’ve been on a break since the December issue). On the same flight were three celebrity participants in the triathlon: Rovilson Fernandez, who did the cycling leg in a three-person relay; and Paolo Abrera and Drew Arellano, who did the whole shebang. Between the three of them they have as much body fat as our elbow. Everywhere they went people stopped them to take pictures, so we didn’t.

(In Cebu we were joined by Jericho Rosales, who can’t take five steps without getting a photo request. We realized that this accounts for the furtive quality many famous people have. If they happen to make eye contact with a stranger, they will be stopped for a photo-op. All the celebrity participants we met had turned off their projection for the weekend, preferring to focus on the race. They all did very well.)

Expected a basic room but found ourselves booked in a cottage in the quite lavish Crimson Hotel and Resort.

We thought the instant noodles were in lieu of a welcome drink, but they turned out to be part of the mini-bar. Crimson gets a lot of Korean guests.

We attended the press conference, then skipped the welcome dinner to go to Forever 21 at SM. They do have more interesting stuff than the Metro Manila branches. Fortunately we set a limit on our shopping and only bought one item, the last one in our size. It had a stain on it, which we removed with soap, water and a toothbrush. (Very proud of our problem-solving.)

The van to the race venue in Liloan was leaving at 6:30 the next morning (Turns out it was leaving at 5:30 but we managed). We can write 2,000 words in a hurry, but waking up early is a torment. We have to go to bed hours ahead of our normal time (3am) and then we can’t fall asleep because we keep checking our watch to see how many hours we have left to snooze.

Instead of going to the welcome dinner or checking out the beach (Not a sun and sand person) we soaked in the tub and watched TV in the bathroom.

Onscreen: Joan Crawford movie with Nazis.

We’d already done our hotel ritual (watch an episode of Law and Order) so we tuned to TCM. Big mistake: they were showing one of our favorite movies, North by Northwest.

All images from 1000 Frames of NXNW except for the cropduster chase which is from amazon.

“Great, we’ll just look at Alfred Hitchcock’s cameo. Wait, we have to see Cary Grant in the Plaza. Okay, the drunk driving scene. We will turn off the TV right after the scene where he gets on the train at Grand Central and meets Eva Marie Saint. Well we can’t miss the part where she hides him in the bunk. Are we nuts, we can’t skip the famous chase with the cropduster.” Before we knew it Cary and Eva Marie were hanging off Mount Rushmore. So we ended up watching the whole movie, but we did make it to the gun start the next morning.