Thursday 9/10/15:
I am a GA at SUU for the women’s soccer team, I love my job
and the people I work with, (my fellow “soccer moms”) especially because we
have some crazy adventures together! This wasn’t our first trip this season,
but here is our first extremely crazy weekend…definitely one for the books J
Thursday is when my “weekend” began…but in reality the
weekends are my busy part of the week especially when the team is travelling. Here is what our schedule was supposed to be:
So 10:30 am we depart Cedar city driving two mini vans and one big ass weird
van thing: talk about total soccer mom mafia! Get to Vegas, have lunch, all
normal, drop the girls off at the airport and go to park the vans when I get a
phone call from a Cedar number: of course I answer but I was driving so it had
to be a short convo. Turns out it’s a lady from HR wanting to off me the on
call AT job I had interviewed for the week before! I told her my situation and
told her I would call her back once I got into the airport. Called her back and
she told me they for sure wanted to offer me the job but that she would need me
to call her the next day to go over specifics, I tell her no problem, and then
we get checked in at the airport with plenty of time to spare. Fly to McAllen,
TX where our adventures begin. We get into town a little later than planned so
instead of doing a walk through we go straight to dinner at BJ’s (I’d never ate
there: life changing experience because they were so good J…I had a lot of firsts
like that this weekend: first time at: Whataburger, PF Changs, Corner Bakery,
Mcallisters, and BJ’s ).
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| The menu was so big it had page numbers!! |
Side note: after getting off the plane and walking out
of the airport to get our rental cars the humidity hit us like a blanket or
like somebody trying to water board us!! Our cars there were two Traverses, a
mini van, and it was supposed to be a highlander but coach fought and won so
she ended driving a freakin awesome black suburban (still total soccer mom
mafia)!
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| Did I mention how cheap gas was down there?!! |
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| The Soccer Mom assault vehicle! |
We get to the hotel around 11 pm, do treatment for the girls (ice,
meds, etc…).
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| We had to sneak a pizooki into our room (coach hates when we all eat junk food) but this peanut butter smores pizooki was the most amazing thing ever!!! |
Next morning easy peasy, get up and go to breakfast. Then we
decide to make a dry run to the soccer field to make sure we know where it is,
and then go shopping at Walmart for post-game snacks, and to drop off an order
for dinner for the girls for that day. Our phone GPS takes us on some ghetto
street so it took us twice as long as it should have to find the field. Therefore,
we were late getting to Walmart and ended up having to fax the order in instead
of dropping it off because come to find out the restaurant is 20 minutes from the
field in the opposite direction from our hotel and we were gonna be late
picking up the girls to go to lunch. Mind you during this time I was also
supposed to call the lady from HR back about the job, but since we got lost and
got busy I totally forget! We get lunch taken care of, get the girls taped for
the game, and get to the soccer field and the AT’s there are very hospitable
and even let us use the TR for some pre-game treatment J Our game starts at 5 pm, (against
Houston Baptist)we play about 20 minutes and are down 2-0 when lightning
strikes! (well within about 2 miles of us). We evacuate the field and go into
the locker room to wait out the storm: end up waiting four hours before
deciding to reschedule the game for Saturday at 1 pm.
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| four hours of waiting turns into a dance party |
Mind you Saturday was
supposed to be a day off to be able to do homework, go to the beach, and
recover from the day before. Mind you all of us have tons of homework to do,
and were planning on being able to do it Saturday, so now everybody is stressed
about that, but then we remember oh Sunday we play early and fly out late so we
can do homework on Sunday….
Anyways, back to Saturday: The weather looks a little
menacing but we start the game on time and pray the lightning keeps its
distance. First half our coach subs a lot of girls when all of a sudden one of
my girls gets taken out! I go out on the field and check her out (thankfully
not ACL) and have the onsite Dr. look at her as well and he agrees not ACL but
most likely meniscus L
So she gets taken out of the game but our coach is out of subs for the first
half except for our back up keeper, so she strips down and puts on the extra “blood
uniform” (extra uniform in case somebody gets blood on theirs) and goes in as a
forward! We ended up winning the game 2-1 thank goodness! Not to mention one of
my girls with a pretty good sprained ankle had an assist with one of the two
goals!
Next day: Sunday, we were originally supposed to play at 11
but the hosting team decided they wanted to play at 11 so we played at 1, and
the teams that played before us ended up going into overtime so our game got
started about 20 minutes late. Today is less humid, and quite sunny and warm.
We win the game 3-1 with no major injuries J
and my girl with the sprained ankle scored 2 of the goals!!!
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| Game winning ankle right there! |
So everybody is
happy, still stressed about homework but happy because we at least won both
games that weekend. So we shower, get ice, and head to dinner and then to
chill/do homework at Barnes and Noble until our flight at 9 pm. While at dinner
me and the GA coach attempt to start our homework that is due that night, but
decide to email our professor instead to beg for mercy to extend our due date.
She emails the GA coach back saying we are allowed to drop one assignment for
the class and that we should be prepared for such things to happen, so
basically we’re screwed. So right about the time we are getting done eating,
coach gets a phone call from a weird number so she ignores it…well this weird
number turns out to be the airline we are travelling with and they leave her a
message saying our flight was cancelled. She calls back and finds out it is due
to mechanical problems with the plane (so at least we didn’t get on the plane
and have another “We are Marshall” situation on our hands). So we break the
news to the girls and they start laughing thinking it’s a joke, (coach has the best
poker face I’ve ever seen so it’s always hard to tell if she’s serious or not)
well once they figure out it ain’t a joke all the girls start stressin cuz now
they’ll be missing 3 days of school and a lot of them didn’t bring their
homework because on this flight we were allowed 1 backpack to fit all our
clothes for the entire trip since the airline charged so much for luggage. So
not only are these girls wore out, homesick, and stressed about school but they
have no clean clothes. So come to find out that since the flight was cancelled
due to mechanical problems the airline has to give us vouchers for at least
hotel rooms for the night. So we go to the airport and pick those up, which
takes about an hour and then we drive to the hotel which looks like a building
from the Pirates of the Caribbean ride in Disneyland only more sketch…Mind you
we’re about 7 miles from the Mexico border so of course coach refuses to stay
at this hotel (thank goodness) and we drive back to the airport and stay at the
hotel right across the street.
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| That red dot is where we were! |
As we pull in we notice there are at least 15
cop cars parked there which we thought was a little odd (later we found out it
is because they all take shifts working the border and always stay at that
hotel while they are there and then when their shift is over they go back to
wherever in the state they are from). We finally get checked into our rooms (4
girls to a rm with Full size beds…not even queens)…Me and the GA coach got
lucky and at least got to share a king instead of a full. After such a crazy
weekend, coach decides to not make the girls eat super healthy and orders in
pizza and gets ice cream and popcorn. So we all sat in the lobby gorging
ourselves on the junk food while watching the Cowboys vs Giants game (Cowboys
won 27-26!! :D).
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| At least we got the air for free ;P |
About this time I remember I never called the lady from HR
back about the job, so I email her telling her I’ll call her the next day. Next
morning, I wake up about 9 (8 in ut) and check my email, and HR lady has
emailed me back saying she will be out of the office most of the day after 9
but I might be able to catch her before that or after 4 (I couldn’t after 4
because I would be in the airport again) so I call her right away and luckily
catch her in the office, we go over all the stuff I need to do yadda yadda, so
I’m set up to start orientation for the job! :D So after that the day should be
chill so we eat breakfast, work on homework, and then just as we are about to
leave to get lunch the power goes out…and not just in the hotel: like our whole
side of the city went out! Luckily where we went for lunch wasn’t affected, but
let me tell you it was quite the ordeal trying to drive there with all the stop
lights out!! We ate at the Corner Bakery and after hearing our sad story the
workers gave us all a free cookie :D.
After lunch we went back to the hotel to
finish homework, checked out about 4 and went to the mall to eat/shop/waste
time until our flight at 7 pm. Not even 5 minutes after we get to the mall the
alarm goes off, haha thankfully it wasn’t a big deal and we got to stay at the
mall but it was just one more thing to add to the list of things that could go
wrong that weekend!
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| Did I mention the ceiling of the plane was leaking? |
Now here I am safe and sound back in Cedar town, ever so
thankful to be home!! This week is our bye week (hallelujah) so we don’t travel
again until next week. By the way, I didn’t want this story to sound like I was
complaining, because yes it was a long tough weekend but I loved just about
every single minute of it!! We had a lot of good with the bad, so in the end it
all worked out alright :D J
