Adventures in Baseball

I am a baseball fanatic. Now, I may not be able to tell you what the Texas Rangers are doing but I can certainly rattle off statistics and give you details of the last game for the BHS baseball team as well as 2 little league teams.

It is an exciting time in baseball for us. My step-son, Justin, is a senior in high school and is having an unbelievable season. BHS has also made the state play-offs for the first time in seven years, so between Zack, Rook, and Justin we have baseball in some form or fashion almost every day.

Friday morning about 11:15 Jason & I left Burleson headed to Abilene for round two of the playoffs against Midland High School. There was some concern about the weather, but they had moved Friday's game time to try to avoid it. Somewhere around Weatherford I decide to hit the email button on my iPhone (Let me stop right now and profess my undying love for my iPhone. I can't imagine how this adventure would have gone without it!) and I find an email that had just been sent saying that they were moving the games to Midland. Okay, no big deal - so I hop on the phone and call the hotel in Abilene to cancel our reservation, pull up Midland hotels on the internet and call to make a reservation.

Okay, all set and we find out that we aren't playing until 10:00 PM so we have plenty of time to mosey west a little further. About another hour in to the drive we start discussing the fact that Jason was getting kind of tired and that we would stop somewhere and eat lunch and then maybe switch drivers. Right around that time we get a text that says we are moving the games to Van Horn High school. Oh dear iPhone, please tell me where Van Horn is... What??? Almost to El Paso? It's not April Fool's, is it? Um, no. And by the way, Jason is WIDE awake now!

So here we go again, I hop on the phone and cancel the hotel in Midland, hop on the internet and am relieved to find that there are a few hotel choices in Van Horn and get one booked. While doing all of this I am texting a friend back in Fort Worth telling her about all of the changes in plans and she tells me to watch out - there are tornadoes in the Big Spring/Midland/Odessa areas. And I could believe it because it was raining HARD. We never saw any tornadoes but we got hailed on a couple of times, and the flooding in Midland was literally unbelievable to me. They certainly aren't set up to handle any flash floods.

Somewhere west of Odessa we finally find sunshine, and a highway patrolman. Luckily Jason wasn't going too much over the speed limit and the patrolman was a nice man and let him off with a warning. We start seeing mountains at some point and arrived in Van Horn about 7:15. Van Horn was an interesting place, certainly not somewhere that I would choose to come visit. If I hadn't known better you could have convinced me that I was in Mexico. All of the houses that we saw were small and run down and there weren't but a handful of restaurants - most of which were Mexican food, and not the good Tex-Mex that we are accustomed to. But let me tell you, that high school had a nice baseball field!

Our boys played their hearts out. They played their first game (and won!) at 10:00 Friday night after spending 11 hours on a yellow school bus. The got up the next morning after about 5 hours sleep and played 2 more games losing the first one but winning the second to become Area Champs. They ate dinner as a team and were allowed to ride back to Burleson with their parents so that they could avoid the school bus if possible. We left Van Horn tired but happy and arrived back in Burleson about 3:00 AM on Sunday morning.

So the adventure continues - the next round is this weekend and they are scheduled to face Lubbock Monterrey in Abilene. Hopefully we don't have to drive to Canada to play the games!