A little extra time in the Windy City

So our trip to Chicago turned into a bit of travel lore. Friday training was very eventful – we had a dog at pregame training for the second straight week, I was able to avoid asking a player’s father to leave, and all eventually went well.

There was some serious hilarity in the airport as we waited for our flight when a young man who looked striking similar to one of our players walked up next to the group. Everybody kind of collapsed in laughter without the guy really knowing a lot about it. Fortunately, our player took it on himself to go up to the guy and pose for a picture, so we have proof of the uncanny resemblance.

All went well with the flight itself until we neared Chicago, and then we got delayed a bit due to the weather, eventually arriving late but not super late. Our bags, on the other hand, were fairly well delayed, and one or two event went missing. Walking out into the cool Chicago air was certainly a shock, but sitting on the bus waiting for the bag and arriving at the hotel maybe two hours late upset plans for more than a few people. Fortunately, I had none, and I wound up watching the second half of the nationally televised Friday night game in the hotel lounge with several of our coaches.

Saturday went relatively smoothly. I enjoyed breakfast in a deli a few blocks from the hotel, got my work done at the team walk, and eventually went to the stadium on the early bus with our reserves and four high school players from our youth system – a very big day for them. Chicago is where I had one of my biggest broadcasting setup issues. Two years ago, I couldn’t get on the air via conventional methods and therefore missed kickoff and the only goal of the game, recovering to call the remainder of the game via cell phone. Not cool. So I felt a little accomplished when I managed to set up properly in about 15 minutes, three hours before kickoff.

The game itself was good enough – a tie in a game we could have won – and I felt the broadcast had its moments, although I don’t feel I was at my sharpest. A good night with some laughs to be sure, but it was still probably 2 a.m. before I went to bed – game night takes a lot of work!

So waking up at 7:30 for an 8:30 bus was not very easy the next morning, but it was just the beginning of a long travel day. To recap:

7 – team breakfast
7:30 – Jon wakes up
8:30 – team bus departs
9 – team bus arrives, warm-ups begin
10 – reserve game starts, I provide updates via Twitter from fieldside table
11:30 – glare from the sun makes seeing my computer screen almost impossible
11:45 – reserve game ends in a loss
12:30 – team bus leaves for airport; I send out match report from computer on bus, then settle in
1 – team bus arrives airport but check-in process is very long
1:30 – security check, grab lunch at bagel place in airport
2:20 – board plane for 2:55 flight
2:45 – drift off to sleep
3:10 – informed of mechanical problem being worked on
3:11 – drift back to sleep
3:45 – informed mechanical problem appeared fixed but broke again
4:15 – finally told to de-plane
4:17 – strap on my radio bag finally snaps, dropping my stuff to the floor in the middle of the terminal
4:20 – the waiting begins … time-killing techniques of the players involve Su Doku, reading, playing games on phone, using my internet card to check facebook, stretching out to sleep, talking on the phone, etc. etc. We are a motley crew spread out across maybe five gates at one end of the terminal. At one point, I am seated next to four players each from a different country, each with a particular accent on the English language, each with a very different outlook on life. One is listening to music, one doing Su Doku, one reading a book, and one reading a magazine. Truly a diverse team. We discuss, among other things, how Easter is celebrated and how many states end in ‘a.’ There is no telling what other conversations are going on around the terminal as we all think about what we would be doing back in Houston.
6:45 – we are finally informed we have tickets on an 8:15 flight, giving us about an hour to get dinner. Amazing job by our team admin to book all players, reserves, staff, high school kids on same flight.
7:40 – prior to boarding, I give up my exit-row seat to a 6-foot-4 player, whose seat is in row 36
7:45 – find out row 36 includes a player with pregnant wife and infant son
8:40 – roughly the time of our departure. Too cheap to buy TV, as always, I’m using Su Doku and crossword puzzle from in-flight magazine to pass the time.
9:40 – I switch over to some combination of The Economist and sleeping. Thankfully, the cute little tyke next to me has gone to sleep with a minimum of fuss. His parents are very relieved.
10:55 – We finally land in Houston. I’m actually looking forward to the heat/humidity
11:15 – I get to baggage claim and my bag is already there. A miracle!
11:25 – I get to my car quickly. What in the world is going on?
11:50 – I get home before midnight! Amazing! Quite an end to a ridiculous travel day that began some 16-plus hours before. Hey, it could have been a lot worse.

College Station return trip from hell

I'm going to hold off on extended posts for a mini-trip to College Station and our trip to New Jersey, I think. The day trip for a site visit in College Station was pretty funny - good group of people and some serious lunch at Rudy's BBQ (not my first visit to the College Station location, I'll have you now) which can be seen at right.

In New Jersey, I had a great dinner with my parents, saw my grandmother, supported a friend at a family funeral, pulled out a 1-1 tie on the road, and got about four hours of sleep before leaving first thing Sunday morning. I heart Jersey, but that about sums it up. Oh, I had an awesome view of NYC again and had a nice early-Saturday-morning NJ Transit ride from Hoboken-Newark-Morristown.

Definitely worth an extended post is the return trip from College Station on Wednesday after our USOC game at Texas A&M. Not the best time I've ever had.

After an extra time loss and all the usual post-game site maintenance, I was set to ride back with Farnold (with a couple of spare pizzas in hand, mind you) to make sure he stayed awake on the drive.

As we pulled out of the parking lot, Farnold's tire pressure light came on, a problem with which he seemed familiar, so we pulled into a gas station to take care of it. Naturally, we picked a gas station with no obvious air pump, but we stopped anyway to get gas and see if the attendant knew of a nearby station with an air pump. Farnold made conversation with the attendant and an Aggie, the latter of whom ended up giving us 75 cents for air, even though we had it in the car. Nice guy.

Anyway, we drove down two or three blocks to a different station and pulled in, but there was a truck at the air pump. So we sat, and Farnold spilled a can of Red Bull in his cup holders and sopped it up with napkins. All the while, this guy remained crouched behind the truck by the front wheel, inflating away. A couple of times he got up, took a few steps backward in his T-shirt, Aggie basketball shorts, and flip-flops, and eyed the tires critically as if to gauge his progress. It took forever.

So he finally finished, and we made fun of him for wearing basketball shorts with no pockets while driving around, and we waited for him to leave. Before he did, a sedan turned in and drove between us as if to exit the station. Then the truck drove off right through our route, and before Farnold could accelerate, the sedan had U-turned into the spot at the air pump. We were both so stunned we didn't even know how to react. We kind of looked at each other with a "Did that just happen?" expression. I'm pretty sure it wasn't intentional, but it was just so bizarre that we had been so frustrated to wait on this guy but ended up getting beaten to the spot.

Instead of going all Kathy Bates in Fried Green Tomatoes on the car, we drove off and found another station, where Farnold put on a serious display of re-inflating tires in short order. What are you gonna do? Things seemed to go OK from there. We drove off down Highway 6, making up one-liners for our night (Forever Aggie, queue-cutter girls), snacking on cold pizza. Farnold even got permission to come in late the next day!

Then, just as we approached Navasota, the 'check engine' light flickered on Farnold's dashboard. So we pulled over, Farnold riffled through the manual a bit, and then he tried to restart the car to see if t he light would go away. No dice, no acceleration, and pretty soon a fading battery. This is where it became not cool.

BOTH of Farnold's phones were all but dead, so I called AAA, which I have, and they said they would send a tow to arrive in in the next hour. As we sat there, waiting for the tow truck to arrive, we (a) tried to explain our position to the AAA operator and tow truck driver on multiple occasions, (b) watched each car on the highway to assess whether it was a tow truck, (c) reacted to new indicator lights on the dashboard, (d) watched our lights - overhead, side-view mirror, hazards, brakelights, headlights, and dashboard - gradually dim and expire, (e) debated how much to tip a tow truck driver for a free 100-mile tow, and (f) shared some gallows humor. Good times. Finally, just as we felt like we had seen three tow trucks go by, and surely one must be ours, the headlights went out and we were all but invisible.

Fortunately, that is exactly when the tow truck driver arrived, and we figured it would be relatively simple from there. It was, mostly, but first the mechanic and Farnold had to figure out how to tow the car, which was no simple task and involved getting a tow-hook out of the trunk, which was virtually inaccessible because the trunk wouldn't open (no power, remember) and internal access was limited due to all the crap the car was carrying. We had been coming from an event, after all.

Eventually we got the tow-hook and let the driver do his thing before settling in for the long haul. I dozed in and out a little bit while Farnold made some conversation. Even after we got home and pushed the car into a parking spot at our apartment complex, Farnold still had to run me - in another car, of course - back to our work parking lot so I could drive home. 2:45 a.m. Awesome.

At any rate, frustrating and tiring as it was, it could have been worse, and I'm only a little worse for wear today.