Road trip of variable length - mansion edition

So we got to go to the home of one of our minority owners last night.

Wow.

It was pretty amazing. Definitely worth more money than I'll ever see in my life. Very glad I got to go.

It was located up in Bel Air, so we drove through Westwood and past UCLA on the way. Gorgeous, gorgeous area. Why didn't I consider UCLA again? But I was saying as we drove that I wouldn't be too interested in the homes right on the main drive, because they were all very close to the street and some pretty major traffic.

The house we were visiting was nothing like that. On a small side street, with the security and the private driveway you would expect. We were welcomed and proceeded to mill around on the terrace, marveling just a bit at a splendor none of us will know. The guys played some soccer with the kids on hand and even threw an American football around - nice arm from our Mexican player, surprisingly.

We had a very nice, buffet-style dinner, and then just hung out for a while watching Monday Night Football. The house had some sweet interior cameras that allowed you to watch other rooms in the house. So when guys went to the game room, we could watch them. Even gave them a big surprise by using the loudspeaker to comment on the ping-pong game! I, of course, got lost while trying to find the game room. Quite a place.

Anyway, that's the low-down. A great way to get away and relax with the playoffs starting on Thursday.

A road trip of variable length - LA edition

There's something very soothing about sitting in a hotel room working on your laptop and being able to look out the window and see gorgeous 85-degree weather and a nearby skyline, surrounded by mountains in every direction. Of course, if I look closely, I notice the haze and the refineries and the backed-up traffic, but still, it's pretty. Especially when you consider that we're headed to 40-degree weather in Seattle tomorrow.

That's where I am Monday afternoon in Southern California, now on the third day of what began as a two-day jaunt and has morphed into a seven-day journey. We knew it was a possibility when we left and were instructed to pack accordingly, but I don't think I really expected it to happen.

We left Houston Saturday afternoon. I read my two Sports Illustrateds almost before takeoff, then tried but quickly gave up on the awful movie Easy Virtue, leaving me with little option but to sleep and stare out the window. Fortunately, despite the presence of the wing, the view out the window was pretty darn interesting.

I love the flight into LAX. You're coasting along over the desert, wondering how the heck anybody lives out there and exactly what substance the ground is made of in this particular location, when you fly over a ridge and are suddenly inundated with the populace. Lots of it. As far as the eye can see. The population density in what I assume to be the San Gabriel Valley - or just the Los Angeles metropolitan area - is intense.

Even from the air, though, it seems to have a different personality and attitude than New York and northern New Jersey and the Northeast. The northeastern population hubs are furious, stacked, and vertical. Los Angeles is so much more horizontal. Like any population center, it feels like there are people everywhere, but in LA, it feels like that everywhere is spread over a large surface area. Because it is.

Anyway, I always marvel at how quickly the view morphs from nature to civilization, and it always reminds me of SimCity when I see houses and neighborhoods up against and running into the hills.

I also enjoy trying to spot landmarks on the final approach, like the Los Angeles River (which seems more like a sewer in places) and the building formerly known as the Great Western Forum, which I have tried to capture with a grainy cell-phone photo taken from the plane.

We got in and had a bit of time to kill at the hotel, but I soon joined some of our staff to see the Galaxy-Earthquakes game at the HDC, where we were to play the next afternoon. It was a bit weird being at a game as a fan, since most of us sat in regular seats. Kind of fun to be able to look around and not think at times. I tried to be a regular Joe and get food at halftime from the concession stands. Although there were no televisions nearby to keep track of the game, the lines didn't seem that terrible. But I still waited the entire 14-minute intermission, and when I finally got to the front, they were out of hot dogs! So I had popcorn for dinner. Awesome.

Sunday was the game, which kicked off at noon pacific time. That meant the early bus left at 8 a.m. Y'all know how early that is for me. Even better was that the Earthquakes, staying at the same hotel, were leaving for the airport at the same time, so the hotel staff almost put bags in the wrong bus.

At the stadium, set-up and pre-game all went fine. As we neared kickoff, my dad emailed that he was having trouble listening online. I exchanged a number of frantic emails with my father and the board op, then decided to let them figure it out and concentrate on the game. So to the best of my knowledge, all was going well. About 20 minutes in, however, my boss came down and showed me a text message that I wasn't on the air even on the real radio back in Houston. Then I started to get texts about it. The board op got it fixed right away once he knew there was a problem, and we got on in time for our two first-half goals and stayed on the rest of the way. We held on for an exciting 3-2 win.

That result meant we tied for first place in the West and are paired with Seattle in the first round of the playoffs. As we had planned in advance, we therefore are staying in LA until Tuesday, then flying to Seattle for our game Thursday night.

So, with all our bags packed in preparation for the airport, we returned to the hotel and re-checked into our rooms. Got some Quizno's, watched the Yankees game, and worked on some game notes - a very relaxing evening.

That brings me to this morning, when I had 15-20 emails waiting for me when I woke up at 8:30 (10:30 CT), and things just continued. Mostly good, but it was just a hectic day of trying to prepare for everything playoffs-related and deal with normal stuff like training and a conference call about the league's digital strategy. I finished with about 85 emails in my inbox by the end of business hours (Central Time) on Monday, and that's after deleting another 40 or so.

All of this means I haven't seen my brother while I've been here - he was too cool for me on Saturday and Sunday, and I'm too cool for him tonight, Monday. Team trip to our part owner's house and all.

Good times. At any rate, it's off to Seattle tomorrow for more adventures. And I think that makes seven straight weeks without a Brian O'Neill's appearance for me. Absolutely shocking.

Going to The Salvador

All year, my boss and I have been making jokes about El Salvador. Or rather, one joke. It's pretty simple and childish, but that's never stopped us before, right? Basically, it goes something like this:

JY: "El Salvador! Which means ..."
LG: "The Salvador!"

and we laugh like crazy. (For the uninitiated, it's a play on a Saturday Night Live sketch where Chris Farly refers to himself as El Nino, which means The Nino. Trust me, it's funny.)

So I finally got to experience The Salvador on our final international road trip of the season. And although the result of the game - a loss to a bad team that ended our chances of advancing - kind of spoiled the trip, I learned that The Salvador is a pretty cool place.

We flew into San Salvador, the capital (imaginative name, huh?) on Tuesday night, which meant that we didn't get the dramatic approaching view from the plane. Instead, we were greeted with generic Central American airport No. 2. I mean really, the terminal looked just like the one in Panama for a bit.

And as in Panama, dollars are accepted currency. In fact, El Salvador has done away with its own currency (Panama still finds occasional use for the Balboa) and just uses the U.S. dollar. Not sure if that's a good thing, but it's helpful for international travelers like myself. Of course, it costs money to enter Central American countries, which nobody warns you about, so our team admin stood by in the immigration line passing out $10 bills.

When the team went last year, it stayed in San Salvador. This year, however, our game was in Metapan, a small cement-mixing town in the northwest corner of the country less than 30 minutes from the Guatemalan border. So arriving under cover of darkness on Tuesday, we squeezed into a bus - my suitcase served as a footrest for our trainer because there wasn't enough room in the bottom storage area - and headed for Santa Ana.

Now the bus may not have had much storage area - or a bathroom, which allowed our guys to use their best ?Donde esta el bano? - but as one player said, "This thing has the sickest DVD system I've ever seen." It also had great air conditioning, so once we figured out the language barrier - I had to show our equipment manager to use the remote control for the player itself, not the monitor - we were able to watch I Love You, Man, in air-conditioned comfort for the two-hour, up-and-down, hairpin-turn drive to Santa Ana. I was told I was missing great scenery in the hills/mountains around San Salvador, but I really had no idea. With the help of a police escort, we made the drive in about 90 minutes, better than the two hours we had budgeted.

We also got armed military members standing at the entrance to the hotel's open-air lobby. There was internet in the lobby but only in some double rooms, and I had a single, so I spent plenty of time on the couches in the lobby working. We also got maybe 100 channels in the rooms, definitely more than some hotels we've stayed at in the United States. We probably had more channels in English, even, than in some hotels in the U.S.! I briefly sampled the Hispanic version of The Amazing Race (they put little flags next to each team to show their country) but mostly settled on ESPN Deportes and soccer.

Though it was mid-October and cool in Houston, El Salvador had temperatures in the 80s despite the mountainous terrain. On Wednesday, spent the day working until it was time to take the minivan to the stadium with the trainer, equipment manager, and my boss (I needed his cell phone to communicate with the radio station at home).

We quickly realized we could not fit all the equipment bags and the four of us in the tiny mini-van. It took some creative packing from the guys (leaving some bags to come on the team bus) to allow the four of us to squeeze in. I was squeezed into the back with our equipment manager, braced against bags at my back and on my left, covering the window.

The drive was fun - nothing like a small space to breed camaraderie - and amazingly beautiful. I don't think I can do it justice in words or with bad cell phone pictures, but it was amazing. Even more dramatic than Panama (although less harrowing, given the lack of rain). On the early part of the drive, when we were driving by poor homes, our equipment manager made a good point: "This kinds of puts it in perspective. We were just worried about fitting bags in an air-conditioned bus." Definitely a different world.

Once we got into the more rural terrain between Santa Ana and Metapan, supposedly a 40-minute drive, it was really gorgeous. We went up and down roads winding around mountains while looking at even more stunning mountains of varying heights staggered in the distance. Just when you got tired of peering and looking up, you looked down to discover a perfectly blue lake breaking up the green floor of the valley between those mountains and yours. As we arrived on the outskirts of Metapan, we saw kids playing barefoot on a makeshift field squeezed underneath and next to the highway and overlooked by a dramatic rock formation, all with mountains in the background. Absolutely amazing. Like something out of a storybook. I almost wanted to go play. I could have managed that with my Spanish, right?

We arrived in Metapan and kept looking for the stadium, but we kept driving on smaller and smaller streets until we arrived at the town square, very similar to one I saw in a gaucho town in Argentina. We drove by a dramatic churchfront - a bigger, not demolished Alamo - turned by the Palacia Municipal (LG thoughtfully provided a translation for us gringos), and turned another corner to pull up next to an adobe facade just like any other.

It turned out that facade was one side of the stadium, and we were less than 20 yards away from our locker room. It was truly amazing how the stadium was squeezed in right next to the center of town. Enthusiastic kids came over to shake our hands and eventually help us carry bags into the stadium - a very warm welcome indeed.

We checked out the locker room (tiled floors!) and the field (very bumpy and with high grass) and the press box (surprisingly nice, despite the occasional splinter and the ant problem). Initially they brought us a wireless phone, but after LG explained that we needed a phone line to properly connect my equipment, they ran a line into the row below us, and we hooked two of my phone cords together to connect.

That ran fairly smoothly all night, with the exception of 10 minutes near the end of the first half, when I was knocked off the air and missed one of the more remarkable goals in team history (scored by our goalkeeper from 70 yards away).

One of our marketing employees is from El Salvador, and she came down and brought friends and extended family a long way to the game, renting a bus to do so. They were all dressed in orange and cheering for the Dynamo (just their luck, on this night), so that was a pleasant surprise. She even got interviewed and later helped me trade for a Metapan scarf after I had despaired of finding one.

After the game, we wanted nothing more than to get home asap. Riding back on the team bus - with a police escort - was virtually wordless from all 30 people riding. Not a fun time.

On Thursday, we got up and out pretty early to give ourselves plenty of time on the way to the airport. This time, we got to see the scenery around San Salvador, and while it was impressive as well - the city really sprawls through its valley - I preferred the wild terrain in the northwest. We actually made the drive in about 75-80 minutes (this guy was braking for nothing, even on winding roads!) and wound up with a lot of time to kill in the airport after our flight was delayed.

But with a little free internet connection, time passed quickly. I gave up my first class seat to a player, settled in to sleep (since the power in my row didn't work), and enjoyed going home. Don't know when I'll need a passport next, but I'm certainly looking forward to it.

Not exactly travel, but U2 is a BFD

U2. One of the few bands of which I own multiple CDs. Whose songs I can and do get pumped to sing. In concert in Houston. Doesn’t get a whole lot better than that.

I was pumped about this concert when tickets went on sale last spring and bought tickets almost immediately. On Wednesday, I finally got to go experience U2 live, and it surpassed every expectation.

I’m not one to gush needlessly, but it was freaking amazing. I’ll try to do it justice. If you don't trust me, here's the Chron blog on the concert.

The concert was not sold out, but it really felt like everyone in Houston – my co-workers, our players, friends – knew that U2 was playing that night. Our seats were in the 500 level in the end zone farthest from the stage, so not close, but the view was still pretty decent.

I’m not a big concert-goer, so I wasn’t really prepared for the sound levels that come with an event of this magnitude. With Muse, the opening band, playing when we arrived, it was really loud. With a game on Sunday, I spent the whole night just a little worried about my ability to broadcast, so I tried to limit my yelling to the girls and my singing along.

The stage for the 360 tour has gotten a lot of attention, and it was pretty darn impressive in size, scope, and variety of color, material, and medium. I really liked the full-circle catwalk that surrounded the stage, connected to it by one permanent walkway and two bridges. But I didn’t think too much about it beforehand.

It became a big part of the show. The production value was incredible. They used so many different techniques for and methods of using the stage, yet you rarely thought about what was going on with the stage – it seemed to flow organically as part of the show. At one point, they lowered the video board from the top of the “spaceship” almost to the floor, but I totally missed it. This being the centerpiece of the show, that was no small feat.

Of course, as soon as he stepped on stage, Bono was the real centerpiece of the show. As a pretty casual fan, his was the only individual name I knew, but whether I had heard of him or not, he was clearly the star and (duh!) really good at being one. He worked all parts of the stage and walkway, he threw his arms up in the air as if celebrating, he jumped in rhythm, he got the audience swaying their arms to the beat, and he pretty much controlled 60,000 people for two hours. Incredible. That picture links to a Chron photo gallery.

Pretty early in the show he did the move where he pulled a woman out of the pit to dance with him on stage. She just about lost it. Weak in the knees does not do justice to the expression on her face and the language of her body. It was freaking hilarious. She and Bono will always have Houston. He went the whole nine yards, too, kneeling to kiss her hand as he moved on to the next song and everything. Not sure how Mrs. Bono feels about that, but I guess it’s part of being married to a rockstar.

I won’t attempt to describe the music. I love U2’s music and have so much respect for its staying power, and they really did a good job of mixing up eras and albums throughout the night. But of course, it really comes down to the big songs. I’ll remember the night and the atmosphere and the set, but what everyone is really going to remember is the big songs. I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking for, Beautiful Day, Elevation, City of Blinding Lights, One, Walk On, Where the Streets Have No Name, With or Without You. Those are the eight I remember vividly, and why not? What a collection of songs.

Three of us had stated our favorite song in advance, so Kido was delighted with City of Blinding Lights, but Lise and I were a little worried when the band went under the stage for the first time about 80 minutes into the show. I knew there would be an encore or two, but I started to be worried we wouldn’t get everything we were hoping for.

Never fear. They put on another 40 minutes of show, stretching the whole set to a full two hours, including Where the Streets Have No Name (my absolute favorite; brought the house down, in my mind) and later With or Without You (for Lisa, and of course one of my favorites). Each of those eight songs lifted many of the audience members to ecstasy with its uplifting yet heartbreaking melody and lyrics.

I also liked how they worked in occasional bits of other songs – Stand by Me and Amazing Grace being the most prominent in my mind – just to add a little something. Definitely not on the CD.

So many of its songs are humanitarian in nature, and U2 of course was overtly political with references to situations in Burma and Saudi Arabia. Bono also made clear efforts to play to the crowd and let everybody know they appreciated the city (basic concert-giving 101, I’m sure), making lots of references to NASA after their visit the day before. Of course, with a spaceship set and a grand concept of the planet, it was an easy and appropriate way for U2 to relate to Houston.

The bridges moved around the circle. The big video screen moved up and down and appeared to have panels that could rotate to completely change how it was perceived. Lights shot to the open sky (Reliant with the roof open was apparently a big deal in the build-up; it definitely made for a much better atmosphere). A neon-lit microphone descended and doubled as a swing for Bono. It was just a crazy show. Spectacular and over the top and awesome.

I would pay big bucks to do it again in a heartbeat, and post-show letdown definitely feels a little like the day after a holiday. Only there’s no U2 concert here next year! But still, what a show. Unforgettable.

Northeastern roots

So I've fallen a bit behind. Missed trips to Colorado (hung out with friends); Columbus (bought StubHub ticket to Ohio State-USC, only to realize it required a student ID I didn't have); and Pachuca, Mexico (some good traveling stories and I got swine flue). All of those games also resulted in losses.

The team has been at home since then, but I took a personal trip to Philadelphia last weekend to visit RBG for the first time since she went off to Penn!

I left the office on a Wednesday afternoon, got to the airport in record time, skipped check-in with only carry-on bags, flew threw security, looked at the monitor, and ... discovered my flight had been delayed roughly 90 minutes. Awesome. Fortunately, my internet card decided to work for about 30 minutes without interruption, a new record, and I was able to kill time until boarding. Once I boarded, however, we got a message from the captain that there had been a security breach in the terminal, and they were not allowing any planes to board passengers. Actually, IAH claims it wasn't a security breach and that the disruption was minimal. Yeah, that's false.

The good news was that once we were airborne, they gave us all free DirecTV on the flight, so I was able to watch the last five innings of the Yankees' playoff opener! The best part was that I kept laughing at errors by the TBS announcers and producers, but the woman next to me had no idea why I was laughing, so she kept looking at me strangely. I almost lost it when the cameraman filming the handshake line dropped his camera, and TBS kept with the shot as the camera showed blades of grass. They cut away JUST as the woman turned to look, so it looked like I was laughing at the handshake line. Bizarre.

Anyway, got to Philly pretty late and needed to catch a $7 train to the train station near RBG's apartment. Well, the night before, I gave $2 to one of our interns to use for bus fare because all she had was a 20. And that left me with $6! So I had to walk to a different terminal to use an ATM and get charged a fee. Good planning, Jon. I eventually made it to the apartment with no further issues.

It was cold in Philly, especially given that the heat index in Houston that day was 109 (it has since cooled in Houston, too), but being a true Northeasterner at heart, I handled it without (too much) complaint.

Obviously, seeing RBG was awesome, and I really like her apartment set-up in walking distance from the Penn campus. I slept late, hung out at the apartment, took advantage of the fully functional internet, and even watched a little baseball on Thursday while she was at class. We had Thai food for dinner, where I tried not to pay too much attention to the Phillies-Rockies game on TV (according to RBG, it's OK to watch playoff baseball if Huston Street is on screen). The Phillies were on everywhere we went in the city, but apparently they weren't on their game, as Huston earned the save to giggles of delight from my dinner companion.

Friday was official Parents & Partners Day, so we went to campus and tried to capitalize on the good things about the day (free food) and avoid the bad things (nametags, boring tours, boring speeches, making small talk).

Went to a law school class on torts with many other parents and partners. I had been warned that the professor was not the best and briefed on the cases, so I was able to - with some level of intellectual authority - concur with RBG and her roommate that maybe this wasn't the finest example of Ivy League professorial duties. For instance, Byrne was spelled Bryne, anesthesiologists were described as anesthetists, the prof wasn't sure of the outcome of some of the assigned cases, and I was assured I was catching her on a good day. At any rate, law school didn't scare me that much. Probably because RBG had already boiled down the cases pretty simply for me. But still.

We walked around the Penn campus some - felt older, more run-down, and less cheery than Rice, but that could be due to the at-times gray weather. It was nice enough, though, and I tried to remember why I didn't look at Penn. I'm assuming it had something to do with a lack of D-I sports and the Greek system. We didn't do a whole lot else on Friday, although we did enjoy some awesome BBQ chicken pizza at a local place. Can't get pizza like that in H-town.

Saturday was to be my triumphant return to Delbarton for my first Homecoming or football game since 2000. It started out well. The (overpriced) Amtrak transportation went just fine, the scenery as we rode through New Jersey was gorgeous (I had forgotten that leaves could change color!), seeing my father and grandmother was awesome, lunch at my family's favorite Indian place was good, Delbarton looked all decked out, etc. But the afternoon didn't turn out perfectly.

Two of my best friends from high school had said they would come, but one canceled (to be fair, he warned me in an email that morning that I didn't get) and the other got stranded in, ironically enough, Philly. So I only talked to two people from my class while studiously avoiding some people from high school I'm not wild about. The new football field (turf, yuck!) looked pretty cool, but the game was terrible.

I realized that, due more to the size of the schools than actual talent, high school football in New Jersey is closer to 4A and 3A Texas football than I had previously cared to admit. Delbarton committed six turnovers (forcing three) and lost 21-7. Six turnovers! And they still should have won the game.

It was a gorgeous (though cold) afternoon to watch a football game in Jersey - rolling hills of multi-colored trees in the background, leaves blowing across the (artificial) field, free food all over the place, good crowd. But six turnovers ...

So we went back to Philadelphia, where we tried to go out for dinner with RBG's roommate and her boyfriend. With everybody very hungry for a late meal, we walked like 15 blocks to the restaurant we were aiming for, passing people who were either way dressed up or way homeless along the way. When we finally got there, the wait was going to be more than an hour. So we kept moving (thankfully headed back toward the apartment), and eventually found a place with only a 20-minute wait.

We went upstairs and stood around in a bar like we were cool people out on the town on Saturday until we were finally called and ate dinner. Then it was back to the apartment, where I watched just enough ESPN to find out that the U.S. had surprisingly won its game (which was not televised) in Honduras and qualified for the World Cup. Then it was off to bed for a 6 a.m. wake-up call, which, of course, is 5 a.m. CT.

Sunday was an unhappy goodbye, a plane back to Houston (first class!), a quick re-charge at the apartment, and a game (thankfully not on radio, since it was an exhibition game) that we won.

Quite a weekend. One I won't get to re-live soon enough. Anyway, that's the update. Thanks for reading. Maybe I'll re-live the Mexico trip one of these days for you.