The story begins on the late evening of February 27. After waiting for weeks and seeing my name still at the top of the waiting list, I received the email from one of the tournament organizers at 10:38 pm informing me that a spot had become available. I was finally able to confirm that I could still make a trip to the Dallas/Fort Worth area work on the dates of the Texas Pinball Festival, and so the following evening at 7:25 pm, I sent in my payment and made preliminary lodging arrangements.

The days leading up to my visit to the Texas Pinball Festival were filled with frenzied planning, packing, and other administrative tasks. With everything packed and lodging arrangements made, the time had finally come to actually set the GPS, hop in the car, and go.

The trip is somewhere around 250-260 miles from my departure point in north central Houston, and ideally a little less than 4 hours of driving time. I’ve had quite a bit of experience with long distance travel from my messenger/courier work as well as my current merchandising job (covering other stores where we do not have a local field representative). I have traveled with others between the DFW area and Houston, including spending a little time exploring parts of the area. So it’s not like I’m just rolling into a strange new city/metro area armed with only the GPS apps on my phone and hoping for the best.

However, this was my first trip this far out of town traveling alone. It helped that I saw at least one familiar face as I stopped over at the Madisonville Buc-ee’s (the only one on I-45 between Houston and DFW until you get to Ennis). That Buc-ee’s is not quite at the halfway point, though, and there’s still a good 2½ hours worth of driving (about 170 miles) left.

I made another brief stopover for a phone call and possibly another soda or bottled tea. The store I wound up at (on Texas Highway 179 near Teague) unfortunately did not have many options. Worse, the drink containers I touched were warm due to a malfunctioning cooler. My immediate reaction was “to heck with that.” Thus, I was back on the road for the last 110 miles or so.

It turns out upon my arrival that my original lodging arrangement was probably not going to be workable. I will go into a bit more detail about this situation in a post on Rant Roulette. (For a variety of reasons, the mentioned post is still in progress.)

Since this was going to take some time to resolve, I decide to take care of other business. First order of business: emptying my bladder. Second order of business: (partially) refilling my vehicle’s fuel tank. (I took care of both at a QuikTrip not too far from where I was.) Then, it was time for me to head over to the Texas Pinball Festival site in Frisco. I needed to pick up my wristband, name tag, and program. By doing so at this point, I would not need to wait in line Friday morning. Such a wait could have potentially cut into practice time in the tournament room.

In the meantime, with some help from people back home, I was able to get lodging squared away. Now that I could breathe a bit easier, it was time for a relatively uneventful dinner at a nearby Qdoba. Why Qdoba, you ask? I had a free entree on my rewards card expiring in early April. (Qdoba had locations in the Houston area some years ago, and I was just short of my  first free entree when all of the Houston area locations were closed permanently. I had kept up with changes to the rewards program. With those changes, I wound up with enough points to qualify for a free entree outright without needing another purchase.)

One beef quesadilla later, it was finally time to head back to the hotel. I needed to prepare for the eagerly anticipated weekend that was now on the horizon.