West Virginia Fastpitch Nationals

Wow, that was a long trip.  We left Spokane Monday night (Nickey, Shannon and Becca) and stayed with Lauren.  The next morning we went to the airport and got checked in.  Monday night we had an intramural soccer game and I was the lucky one out of the bunch who got hurt while playing, some girl should of let it go out of bounds instead she shoved me and my ankle popped out of place and the result was a high ankle sprain for my trip to West Virginia.  So, Nickey went and asked the airport people to get a pre-boarding pass just so I would not keep people from getting onto the flight because of my limp. Nickey was my aide, to help me out with my bags.  Nickey enjoyed this more than I did.  

We left Spokane around 7:25 and got to Oakland, CA about 9 something.  We stayed on the flight and went to Los Angeles, CA where we got off the plane and waited for our next one to Baltimore, MD.  Once again Nickey asked the airport people if I could have the "special people pass".  I was made fun of most of the time while we were walking.."Val, you should get a wheelchair..."  I said no.  We got on our flight and left around 12:30 PM.  We got into Baltimore about 8ish Eastern time and went to the car rental place.  We waited there until the three vans pulled up.  We packed our stuff in and we were on our way to Morgantown, WV...217 miles away.  We stopped for food before it got later in the evening at an area with a McDonald's, Pizza Hut and a grocery store.  Apparently, some of the girls had a good time at the McDonald's.  Someone had put an opossum in the toilet.  Someone took a picture of it to show the others.  During the trip, we had some interesting...yet funny conversations.  There were a couple of signs that sparked our interest.  There was this wild life sign that had a deer and a bear on it.  Me and Nickey laughed and repeated "Da Bears".  When we made it to the Welcome to West Virgina sign, it said "Open for business"...haha we laughed a lot and we still do.  We got to our hotel about 1:30 AM and we went to sleep.  It was a very long day of travel.

We played our first rounds of softball today.  Pool play consisted of Virginia, Penn State and West Virginia.  We won our first game, lost the second and third...we shouldn't have lost these ones.  We were ahead and then "coug'd it".  We played well for only having 4 games this season before we came here. 

Ok, I left off at pool play.  The next day was actual bracket play.  We were scheduled to play Virginia...again.  I am getting sick of playing the same teams day by day.  It was like that in Maryland, same teams over and over again.  Oh well.  We played very well against them and lost it in the bottom of the seventh.  With that loss, we were done for the day and did not play until Friday morning.  The whole day we did some homework, drove around Morgantown (specifically to the Starbucks) and just kind of hung out.  For dinner, we all went to the mall where this restaurant was.  Garfield's was the coolest.  We got to draw on our table cloth (which was butcher paper) with crayons...how cool is that?  Being the people that we are, we took full advantage of it.  Lots of inappropriate things were drawn as well as written.  It was a good time let me tell ya.  After dinner we wandered the mall.  Most of us found ourselves at this sports store where everything was 8 bucks.  The whole time I did not believe this was true, in fact, it was too good to be true!  There was so much cool stuff!  I bought two shirts because I could.  Me and Shannon needed to pee so we walked I swear the full length of the mall.  We saw this guy eating in slow motion.  I hoped that Shannon saw it too, sure enough she did and we discussed it.  Strange.  We found everyone and went back to the hotel.  Not like the sign was big enough or anything...Nickey missed our turn into the hotel and we had to turn around and go back.  Ha!

Next day we played Air Force.  If we did not beat them, something was truly wrong with us.  We ended up taking it to the bottom of the inning again and they tied it sending us into the International tie breaker.  Something we have no done since USC, two years ago.  This time it went in our favor.  The team sent me to the store where I bought a buttload of Gatorade so I missed part of the next game.  I got back just in time to watch the rest of the Ohio game, where we lost it in the bottom of the inning once again.  I'm beginning to think being the visitors does not work in our favor...who seconds that?  As a team we went to the Chinese Buffet, where Nickey ate a frog leg.  We had a thunderstorm and Nickey freaked out.  Later, Becca got together a movie night where only 5 of us went, the rest drank in Jackie's room.  We went and saw Silent Hill at the mall.  Silent Hill was one creepy movie.  It took place in West Virginia, which I found funny because we were in West Virginia. After the movie, we had to trek all the way around the mall because we parked the van and walked through the mall to get to the theater.  It was a long walk through the rain, but fun at the same time.

Saturday we drove around Morgantown.  We tried to find a place to study and that turned out to be a no-go.  We returned to the hotel and then went to Starbucks.  Me and Shannon were hungry and we drove all the way back to Chick-fil-A aka Chick-a-flicka as we call it.  It was my first time eating there and I liked it.  Took some balloons for fun.  Drove down to High Street to see where it was.  Parked the van and walked around.  Went to a couple of stores and stuff.  Got tired of it, went back to the hotel and went to dinner at Colasante's.  We were there for a loooong time.  Took lots of weird pictures.  After dinner we found out way back at High Street.  This time we honked at all of the drunk people on the side of the road, haha.  We wanted Coldstone so we needed to find a parking spot.  So...we tried several times to parallel park, did not happen right away.  The people in the van, including Nickey had no idea that she turned down the one-way street the wrong way until we saw the headlights coming towards us.  She quickly pulled into a parking lot and turned around.  We tried it again.  This time we found a parking spot to parallel park in, however when we were done, both tires on the passenger side were on the curb...no one had to worry about tripping over the curb to get out of the van.  We went into Coldstone and we made fun of the people who worked there.  I almost got a free bowl of ice cream but I just wasn't feeling it.  I was to drive the rest of the way back to the hotel, Nickey was done for the night. 

Sunday...oh man what a long ass day.  Woke up early, drove 214 miles from Morgantown to Baltimore.  Had a frickin' plane delay because the landing flappers were messed up.  We had an announcer who did not know anything and would update us with nothing every 10 minutes.  People had stuff to do, we needed to get back at a decent time.  We ended up getting on a different plane to Salt Lake City staying on it while we were there and ended up going to Portland to get on another plane to Spokane.  This really irritated people beyond comprehension.  We were all on an airplane for hours.  We were tired, hungry, irritated and just wanted to be home.  Lawson came and got up in Nickey's van and we went and got food and gas and went back to Pullman.  Got home about 12:30 that morning to signs that Megan and Wendy left me in my bedroom.  Aww, they missed me.  :)