Ultimate Trip - Santa Barbara

The BYU team rests after a tough game

It's been a hectic weekend. Thursday night Neal called me up (after I had already backed out of going) and asked if I could drive some people to the Santa Barbara tournament because they were short on cars. Reluctantly I said yes. Of course, truth is I really wanted to go and socialize and be warm for the weekend, I just couldn't see spending all that time on the road when 1) I'm injured; 2) I need to finish law school applications; 3) I need to get cracking overtime on product documentation for our upcoming product release; and 4) I have a ton of church obligations on Sunday.

Anyway, I packed this morning and then spent the remainder of it way busy just wrapping up odds and ends at work. About 1:30 or 2:00, when I went down to Provo to pick up James, Aaron, Tyler, and Jamie, and we all headed down to Santa Barbara. Amazingly, we stopped a total of one time, in Las Vegas, where we ate and gassed up (we almost ran out of gas). I drove the first leg, and Aaron drove the second, and we watched a number of Newsradio episodes as well as "A Beautiful Mind" on my laptop.

Just a side note here, my Axim started acting up. The screen was acting all funny, as if someone were pressing on it repeatedly. Something's screwy in there, and after a while if you hit it hard enough it stops, but it worries me nonetheless. Still, we were able to use it for GPS, which was the really important thing. Meanwhile, the whole connecting to the Internet on my laptop via bluetooth on my phone worked great. I was online off and on all the way from Vegas to California.

But back to the story. In Santa Barbara, we stayed with these guys Amy and Becca found through the church. They lived really close to campus, and it was Friday night, so when we got there around 1:00, it was impossible to find parking, and we looked really out of place being older and carrying around sleeping bags. The place we stayed in was super crowded, and I had to wedge my sleeping bag between two already sleeping people on the floor. It wasn't extraordinarily comfortable, but I got a little bit of sleep.

Saturday morning, my leg was all tight and so I didn't play at first. We got cremated the first game. It was so bad, I didn't even bother with video. The second game was almost as bad. We just don't have a lot of experience working together as a team. But about then, I started to feel better, so I played a significant amount of offense both the third and fourth games. We won the third game handily (no, I don't think it had anything to do with me playing). The fourth game, though, was tight. Loads of fun. It probably shouldn't have been so tight, but we were still making a lot of errors. We didn't give up, though. It was probably my best game. I threw at least four points. I made one throwing error, I think, but we ended up scoring anyways. My favorite was a break-mark, inside-out throw to Don at the top of the stack. It just opened up the whole other side of the field for a quick score. Anyway, we won. The last point—it was winners take all because of a time cap—was ridiculously long, at least 15 minutes. There were so many errors, but also some great defense. It was entertaining, but that was probably because I was sitting out. Don was an animal covering their handlers—he didn't give them any dumps.

After the tournament, we went to a single adult activity put on by the Santa Barbara single's ward. Most everybody on the team went to a bonfire at the beach after that, but Neal, Jamie, Tyler, and Bethany decided they wanted to go home that night. We figured we weren't getting any sleep anyway, with things being so crowded, so why not sleep in the car. And besides, I wanted to get back to take care of some things at church. The drive was pretty safe, except for the time where we almost ran out of gas near Bakersfield, and except for the freak snow storm at Cedar City. That kept me from getting back in time for interviews with the Stake Presidency, but at least I got back in time for church. Granted, I was pretty scruffy looking because I hadn't shaved all week.

And of course I came home and slept as soon as all the meetings were done (this wasn't until around 7:30).

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Posted January 25, 2004 (11:44 PM) | Comments (1)