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Nov. 25th, 2004 12:07 amOK, that post was from Seattle, this one is from Omaha, and meantime we've been through Austin. A few of the details:
Sunday morning on the way from our hotel to rehearsal, I managed to trip over a curb on International Highway and fall. The horn is safe - I sorta wrapped my body around it, as soon as I realized I was falling, and my arm and jacket kept it safe. The jacket was my motorcycle jacket, double layer of cordura nylon, and proved its worth - arm is fine, just a few bruises from impact. My knee, on the other hand, is banged up. It swoll up to about 3" larger than usual, and wouldn't bend at all for a couple days. Big scrapes. Jeans ripped up- several large tears in knee. Denim nowhere near as strong as Cordura. Note to self: buy real riding pants sometime soon. Anyway, horn is fine so I limped on to rehearsal. Went well. Concert went fantastically well Sunday evening, quite possibly one of the best performances our band has EVER given.
Flew home Monday. All the TSA luggage people in Seattle had played in their high school bands, and recognized the tuba mute right off and had no trouble with the tuba and the saxophone inspections. You would have thunk Austin would be like that, calling itself the Live Music Capital, but no, Seattle was a lot friendlier to large musical metallic objects. The horns, and we, arrived home safely, after a couple of flights on which the only food was pretzels. America West will not get any repeat business from me - not only did they not even have an alternative lower-sodium snack, they didn't have any lime for my club soda. Frontier, on the way to Seattle, had at least offered Sun Chips as an alternative to their regular Doritos; the Sun Chips have only half the sodium of the others. America West was aggravating in several ways. We had supper after we got back to Austin, finally arrived home around midnight, fed all the critters, fell into bed.
Then Tuesday, I had 2 classes to teach, and we had about 4 loads of laundry to do, before leaving for Omaha by car. My father in law loaned us his car, which is considerably newer and in better condition than ours - horrible gas mileage, but more reliable. His is a 3-year old Cadillac, ours a 10-year old Mazda with well over 100,000 miles on it. You can imagine which is the more comfortable for 14 hours of driving. We wound up leaving Austin later than expected, not till about 7 pm, so we only got as far as just north of Fort Worth before finding a stopping place.
We ate dinner at a surprisingly good pizza place in Salado. Exit onto Mill Creek Rd from IH-35, where you see a big sign for Brookshire Brothers grocery store. Old Mill Pizza is in the little shopping center off behind the grocery store. The guy who runs it was formerly a chef for Omni hotels. It was a really, really good pizza. (Yes, more sodium than I should have, but a hell of a lot better than nuked hot dogs from a gas station quik-mart.) ice place, great service, cheerful atmosphere... if you ever have to stop to eat while on a trip to Waco or such, stop in Salado and try Old Mill Pizza.
The hotel near FW had Harney & Sons tea for breakfast, much better grade than you'd expect, but ruined it by serving hot water that still smelled like coffee pot. We got on the road again a little after 9 a.m. Nothing much interesting between there and Nebraska, other than highway 75 in Kansas taking a 40-mile or more detour. We got to Omaha by 9 pm even with lunch, rest stops, etc, and found Ed's house, which we hadn't been to in 20 years. Ed reserved us a motel room, since the house is pretty crowded with the 2 college-age kids home from school and my parents also staying there; motel was fine with us. So here we are.
Along the way I've crocheted 2 hats and a scarf, when I wasn't driving. We brought along a whole bunch of CDs but found NPR/classical music stations along a good percentage of the route, so we haven't used up all the CDs yet. What S did was just grab our entire Christmas collection - we have enough xmas albums that if we listen to 20 or 30 of them this weekend alone, then we might get to hear them all by January 6!
Bits and pieces of this post will be cross-posted to other areas.
Sunday morning on the way from our hotel to rehearsal, I managed to trip over a curb on International Highway and fall. The horn is safe - I sorta wrapped my body around it, as soon as I realized I was falling, and my arm and jacket kept it safe. The jacket was my motorcycle jacket, double layer of cordura nylon, and proved its worth - arm is fine, just a few bruises from impact. My knee, on the other hand, is banged up. It swoll up to about 3" larger than usual, and wouldn't bend at all for a couple days. Big scrapes. Jeans ripped up- several large tears in knee. Denim nowhere near as strong as Cordura. Note to self: buy real riding pants sometime soon. Anyway, horn is fine so I limped on to rehearsal. Went well. Concert went fantastically well Sunday evening, quite possibly one of the best performances our band has EVER given.
Flew home Monday. All the TSA luggage people in Seattle had played in their high school bands, and recognized the tuba mute right off and had no trouble with the tuba and the saxophone inspections. You would have thunk Austin would be like that, calling itself the Live Music Capital, but no, Seattle was a lot friendlier to large musical metallic objects. The horns, and we, arrived home safely, after a couple of flights on which the only food was pretzels. America West will not get any repeat business from me - not only did they not even have an alternative lower-sodium snack, they didn't have any lime for my club soda. Frontier, on the way to Seattle, had at least offered Sun Chips as an alternative to their regular Doritos; the Sun Chips have only half the sodium of the others. America West was aggravating in several ways. We had supper after we got back to Austin, finally arrived home around midnight, fed all the critters, fell into bed.
Then Tuesday, I had 2 classes to teach, and we had about 4 loads of laundry to do, before leaving for Omaha by car. My father in law loaned us his car, which is considerably newer and in better condition than ours - horrible gas mileage, but more reliable. His is a 3-year old Cadillac, ours a 10-year old Mazda with well over 100,000 miles on it. You can imagine which is the more comfortable for 14 hours of driving. We wound up leaving Austin later than expected, not till about 7 pm, so we only got as far as just north of Fort Worth before finding a stopping place.
We ate dinner at a surprisingly good pizza place in Salado. Exit onto Mill Creek Rd from IH-35, where you see a big sign for Brookshire Brothers grocery store. Old Mill Pizza is in the little shopping center off behind the grocery store. The guy who runs it was formerly a chef for Omni hotels. It was a really, really good pizza. (Yes, more sodium than I should have, but a hell of a lot better than nuked hot dogs from a gas station quik-mart.) ice place, great service, cheerful atmosphere... if you ever have to stop to eat while on a trip to Waco or such, stop in Salado and try Old Mill Pizza.
The hotel near FW had Harney & Sons tea for breakfast, much better grade than you'd expect, but ruined it by serving hot water that still smelled like coffee pot. We got on the road again a little after 9 a.m. Nothing much interesting between there and Nebraska, other than highway 75 in Kansas taking a 40-mile or more detour. We got to Omaha by 9 pm even with lunch, rest stops, etc, and found Ed's house, which we hadn't been to in 20 years. Ed reserved us a motel room, since the house is pretty crowded with the 2 college-age kids home from school and my parents also staying there; motel was fine with us. So here we are.
Along the way I've crocheted 2 hats and a scarf, when I wasn't driving. We brought along a whole bunch of CDs but found NPR/classical music stations along a good percentage of the route, so we haven't used up all the CDs yet. What S did was just grab our entire Christmas collection - we have enough xmas albums that if we listen to 20 or 30 of them this weekend alone, then we might get to hear them all by January 6!
Bits and pieces of this post will be cross-posted to other areas.
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