Weekend Getaway

We all know that the weather last week wasn’t up to my exacting standards. To show my displeasure with Earth I decided to take a last second trip down to Texas for the weekend, and by last second I mean I had been planning this trip for months. I went home to run in a Tough Mudder (I’ll give a full account of that next week) and see my mother for her birthday.

When I landed and walked outside the terminal I was met by a clear, blue sky; no wind to speak of; and a perfect temperature of 70 degrees. I immediately texted Coach Rodgers and told him I may not come back. This feeling was only compounded a few moments later when I ate lunch at the Mellow Mushroom. I know this sounds like the not-to-coy title of a place selling psychedelics in the back room – and honestly I think my waitress may have imbibed more than a few times in her life – but the pizza was delicious. Have you ever had a roasted red potato pizza? I hadn’t either until I sank my teeth into that little slice o’heaven.

He's wrong, it's actually when you have roasted red potato pizza

Once you have pizza like that your day can’t be anything but good. If you get in a car wreck, your wife leaves with your best friend, and the bank takes the house? “I’ll worry about that tomorrow, right now this pizza is just too good to worry about anything else.” And it also had sour cream, caramelized onions, and some mystery sauce that probably took 3 years off my life. The rest of that evening was pretty tame, I just had about 5 pieces of cornbread because I love cornbread… and anything edible apparently.

The next day I went to Brewed in Fort Worth which is a coffee/brew house which had a great iced cinnamon latte. I was with a coffee connoisseur this time so there was only a limited amount of awkwardness emanating from me. That’s not to say I didn’t do anything awkward – I almost knock my seat over when I sat down – but I kept it to a minimum. Brewed was just the preamble to the full meal at Cheesecake Factory. My whole family was there to celebrate my mom’s birthday. I went all out and split a salad. Yes I know what you’re thinking but I didn’t want to eat poorly before my race the next day. Of course, I immediately destroyed any good I had done by ordering a cheesecake. I couldn’t help myself! It had caramel, Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, and Butterfinger!

This may be worse for you than drinking and driving

Afterward came the real exciting part: I spent 2 ½ hours at REI buying things for my trip to Big Bend. Do you know how easily you can spend all your money in that place? Let me give you a hint: very easy. I’m not quite sure how much I spent because I didn’t check the prices on anything. I figured it was better this way, so I wouldn’t back out due to some little complaint from my conscience like “if you spend that much you won’t have any money for food.” You know, something trivial like that. The rest of my trip was centered around the Tough Mudder which I took part in on Sunday. I’ll detail that next week, but my writing this post is a good indication that I survived. No promises though.

I'll take one of everything

Before coming back to Iowa on Monday I went to another hipster coffee shop in south Dallas called Oddfellows and then since I wasn’t feeling jittery enough I went to Coffee House Café in north Dallas. Yeah I may be developing a problem, but my iced vanilla latte was delicious. Despite all this I still managed to sleep the whole plane ride back. I was a bit tired from sleep deprivation over the past 3 days. Tune in next week as in chronicle my journey through a 12 mile obstacle course and cause everyone to believe I’m a masochist.