East Coast Adventures

I must say my internal clock hates me right now. I've gone from central time, to mountain time, to central time, to eastern time, to central time, then on Thursday I change to pacific time, then back to cental time on Sunday. I am definitely ready for a regular schedule.

This weekend we traveled to Maryland to play in a tournament. Traveling with us is always an adventure. It was monsoon-like when we left Columbia and continued all the way to St Louis. Thanks Hurricane Gustav. Wayne decided to drop us off at the terminal because we were short on time (he was waiting on Susan at Hearnes, only to find out 30 minutes later she was driving her car after dropping off the kids), which we were very appreciative of due to the heavy downpour. Everyone gets out and we are unloading bags as fast as possible because the rain is blowing in the cover and Deng Yang locks her keys in her van, which is still running. We all check in (thank goodness she had given our tickets to Tom already) and she gets that matter taken care of. No real problems after that. We have to be the most directionally challenged team in America though. It's not a complete trip unless we do several u-turns. First we drive right by the hotel and somehow manage to get lost. Then going to the gym we take a wrong exit, finally get back on the highway, finally take the right exit, get an unexpected view of the UMD campus (very pretty though) before finally getting to the ComCast Center. We have a Garmin & paper directions, but apparently either don't believe the directions or just choose not to follow them. Now for me, this is beyond frustrating because I am super-organized and hate that we are never on schedule and can somehow manage to get lost EVERY time we go somewhere. Saturday we woke up to pouring rain--Hurricane Hannah had hit Maryland. Luckily we were in the ComCast Center all day, so we missed the worst of it.

Maryland is pretty. Lots of tall trees, although, for a girl who grew up in flat West Texas with no trees, I hate not being able to see everything around me. I was sad that we were 10 miles from DC and didn't get to go tour it, but there was literally no free time.

Friday night we played Maryland and won in 3. Saturday morning we played Kentucky and got swept--bad game, we'll just leave it at that. Saturday evening we played St. John's. That was a long and hard fought match. We eventually lost in 5, with 59 lead changes and 27 ties. Complete craziness. It was great to finish the tournament out on a positive note with a record of 2-1. This brings our overall record to 4-2. The ComCast Center is AMAZING. It's HUGE. They house many sports in there as well as academics, their hall of fame and many other offices. I'm not sure exactly when they built it, but it's fairly new. Also in celebration of their 150th anniversary, they have 50 terrapins around campus, the town and neighboring towns that are all painted different. That's the one outside the ComCast Center. On it's shell are faces from the 2002 Men's National Championship Team. Pretty neat idea if you ask me.

Football won big on Saturday vs SEMO. 52-3. Lots of different people played so that is exciting. They are now 2-0 and still ranked 6th. Volleyball is in Reno next weekend at the University of Nevada, ironically, the football team plays Nevada this weekend at well, only it's in Columbia. We'll be cheering from afar, in the enemies land.