Last weekend Freya continued her path to Olympic Gold by competing in the Texas State Trampolining and Tumbling championships. For reasons best known to the organizers, this was in Lubbock, which is on the far North edge of Texas, so not really a convenient location for anyone apart from people who live in Lubbock – although if they live in Lubbock they have my sympathy and deserve every break they can get. Anyway, owing to my general aversion to air travel (and a $250 per person flight cost because I didn’t get round to booking anything up until the week of the competition), I opted to drive.
I checked out the route on Google Maps and it clocked in at 534 miles one-way, and an estimated 9 hours 42 minutes of drivetime. That sounded a bit excessive, so I asked for a second opinion, consulting AT&T Navigator (on my BlackBerry) which said it was 520 miles in just under 9 hours, so I went with that. AT&T Navigator actually did a pretty good job of taking as straight a line as it could between Katy and Lubbock. This did mean taking some fairly small one-lane-in-each-direction back-roads, but at least now I know the difference between a County Road, a Farm to Market Road, and a Ranch Road. (Not much, if the truth be known..) The advantage of taking the back-roads is that there’s almost no other traffic, so you can pretty much go as fast as you like. So I managed to stick at a more-or-less steady 85mph, apart from a brief moment of madness when I pushed the car up to 106mph, just because Freya wanted to see how fast it would go. And not a single speeding ticket – largely thanks to my trusty radar detector and an inbuilt paranoia that can spot a police cruiser at 2 miles. Why so fast? Why not just be a good, law-abiding driver? Simple. I managed the journey in a mere 7.5 hours, knocking almost an hour and a half off Navigator’s estimated time (although that still works out at an average of 69mph, so nanny nanny boo boo to the police), and that’s an hour and a half I could spend more usefully than cooped up in a car touring the backwaters of Texas.
Actually, I did have another reason for wanting to reduce the journey time as much as possible. In a concession to keeping Freya happy, I tuned the satellite radio into Radio Disney for the whole journey (as opposed to my usual XMU), and there’s only so much Hannah Montana, Taylor Swift and the Jonas Brothers I can cope with in one go. Though to be fair, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be. And it certainly could have been worse – it could have been the abhorrent Kidz Bop which was the free CD from Jack in the Box on the way back (where the fries were disgusting, by the way…).
Driving my way across Texas at least gave me the chance to see a bit more of God’s Chosen State than I have done so far. I passed through a whole bunch of places I had heard of but never visited, like La Grange (made famous by ZZ Top), El Paso (famous for the salsa and other Mexican foods), Waco (famous for the Fed’s sterling handling of David Koresh and the Branch Davidians [by burning down their compound] – and also the birthplace of Dr Pepper), plus a bunch of other places that sound much more interesting than they actually are in real life (Comanche, and Fairy) – plus the wonderfully-named Stink River (I didn’t stop to check if it was aptly named).
I also got to see a bit more of life in ‘rural’ Texas (always a bonus for us ‘city folk’). Once you get into the North of the State, the roadside businesses start selling things like “bait and traps” and offering services such as “Deer Processing”. Real nice. You also start passing through some tiny places – they all proudly announce their population on the City Limits sign – the smallest I saw had a mere 413 people, which makes the “City” in “City Limits” a bit of a stretch. And yet they still manage to support a couple of churches! That said, the drivers out in the boonies are pretty friendly – just about every driver I passed on the one-lane roads would ease onto the hard shoulder to let me past. Until I reached College Station (home to Texas A&M University) on the way back, where every dickhead student in a pickup truck their mommy and daddy had bought for them drove like a twat. One even decided it would be fun to block the road so no-one could get past, forcing one impatient driver (no, not me!) to overtake on the inside on the hard shoulder.
The downside of relying exclusively on AT&T Navigator, with its turn-by-turn directions, is that I had absolutely no idea where I was from one minute to the next. I just gave it the address of the hotel (a spacious Comfort Suites) in Lubbock when I left home, and it told me to turn here or there, sending me off down roads, as it felt fit. But as I never saw the whole route mapped out (all I could see was the next turn) I was pretty much going on trust. Which I was happy to do until I started to run out of gas, and realized that I could be 50 miles from the nearest gas station (or other sign of life). Even the “search along” function failed to find any gas stations, which was a worry, although I did eventually hit one just about when the warning light started flashing.
But even without the full route in front of me, it was pretty easy to tell when we were approaching Lubbock. A friend had warned me about the smell, and they weren’t wrong. As soon as we hit Post, which is about 20 miles outside Lubbock, the stench of oil and sulfur hit us. We shouldn’t have been surprised, as there were nodding donkeys everywhere, sucking the oil out of the ground – it was like every home had one in their front yard. Truly disgusting. Just before reaching Post we’d passed through an enormous wind farm, with literally thousands of wind turbines stretching across the countryside.  I initially thought it was good that the Oil State was investing in alternative energy sources, but now I’m thinking that they weren’t turbines at all – just huge fans trying to blow the stench of Lubbock away!
Anyway, the competition went OK. Freya was in three events (Trampoline, Tumbling, and Double-Mini-Tramp) and came away with three medals, so she was happy. But I think if I want her to be the next Olga Korbett (Ronnie Corbett, more like…) I need to start being as pushy as the rest of the parents there – shouting from the bleachers, videotaping everything so we can replay it back later and point out the exact frame where our little prodigy were half an inch out on their bounce, and so on. Hell, I don’t even have a “Team Freya” T-shirt made up, so I’m way behind the pack.
After the competition we got out of Lubbock as fast as we could. We made it as far as Abilene before stopping for the night (Marriott Courtyard – love those Marriott beds!), which at least got us a third of the way home. Freya insisted on making full use of the hotel’s pool, and then used the over-sized beds for some additional trampolining practice, which must have amused the people in the next room. And then it was just another five hours back to Houston on Sunday.
All-in-all, despite the 1,069 mile round trip, it was well worth it for the Father-Daughter bonding. And given the choice of a couple of nights in a hotel (albeit in Lubbock…) for Gymnastics, or two nights in a tent with the Scouts, I’d take the Gymnastics any day. And if things go well, next year we’ll make the Nationals, which is in LA, not Crudbucket, Texas. Gotta love the bounce.
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