An eventful trip

It started out easy enough. We drove halfway down on Wednesday night and finished the drive up on Thursday morning. We checked in to the hotel, then went to the check-in for the contest. After that it was close to dinner time. The hotel, amazingly enough, provided dinner as well. So we ate there to save some money so that we could eat at better places later on. The kids (my students) went and swam in the pool as the adults retired to our room. I finished my previous post about being in Austin that evening, took a shower and was in bed by 10:00. Unfortunately that was when the storms started coming through Austin. Luckily there were no tornadoes but there were straight line winds that gusted up to 92 mph. The power at our hotel went out around 10:30 p.m. That didn't bother me so much since I was already in bed. But it didn't come on in the morning either. I slept fitfully worrying about whether or not I was going to be able to wake up in time. We had to leave by 7:15 for the tournament. We asked for a 6:15 wake-up call, but we had no phones working either. I didn't set the clock since we did the wake-up call. I guess the clocks had a battery in them since it still worked, but it was too dark for me to set it. A 5:45 I finally remembered that my cell phone had an alarm so I found it and set it, but it was pointless. My student knocked on the door at 6:00 a.m. asking how she was going to iron her suit without any electricity. (We told her to do it the night before.) She took a very cold shower that morning. We got dressed in the dark. We left to go to the tournament early so we could finish getting ready there. We put on make-up in the car and my student had to find a place to dry her hair.
The tournament itself was fine. I had to judge a round of persuasive speaking. My student didn't break to finals in prose, but she did break in persuasive. After that, we took the kids shopping at a vintage store and then tried calling the hotel to find out if they had power. We couldn't get through. We also discovered that our cell phones weren't working well either. Turns out a cingular tower was damaged or something. So we decided to head to the hotel. We drove up there around 6:30 and discovered that the power was still out. We asked if they had any indication of when it might be restored and they had been told "within 24 hours." They said that we could stay there free and we were like "Yeah, right." They couldn't even help us get rooms at another hotel since they didn't have any phone service. It was amazing because the hotel next door, the convenience store in front, and the hotel across the street all had power. We tried calling other hotels using our cell phones but couldn't get through. So we decided to drive and go to the closest hotel to see if they had rooms. We went to the La Quinta across the street and fortunately, they had rooms... smoking of course, but we decided to take them because we didn't want to spend all evening driving around. They put an ozone machine in our rooms while we went out to dinner to help get rid of the smell. We left and went to a deli called Katz that had pretty decent food and incredible cheesecake for dessert. We didn't get in until about 10:30 that night and I was completely exhausted and couldn't write the post.
The next day we headed back to the tournament for the persuasive finals round. It finished around 12:30m and then we headed for lunch. We went to the awards ceremony at 3:00. The bad thing about going to ceremonies with other speech educators is the fact that they are very long-winded. It was 3:45 by the time they started announcing the winners in each category. Our student placed 6th which she expected and we left immediately afterwards. It was my turn to drive and we headed home. We made it to Shallowater and checked into a hotel. We went to Scholtzkey's for a later dinner and then went to bed. I couldn't post last night either because that hotel had no internet service.
We got up early this morning and left by 7:15. I got home shortly before 11:00 and I was able to make it to Mass at 11:15. After church we had a dinner for all the new people in the parish. I was able to meet a few new people and had a great meal of brisket and all the fixin's. So now I'm home. I'm exhausted and am seriously thinking about a nap very soon. I have another interesting post to work on and will hopefully post it later tonight or sometime tomorrow. I am thankful that I have the day off. I need the time to recuperate.