--Thursday 7/28--
My flight left O'Hare at 9am. Since my Daddy used to travel for work, he drove me and dropped me off. Of course my huge bag weighed 8 lbs more than the weight limit, so I spent about 15 minutes trying to load the heaviest things into my purse and carry-on tote so I could re-weigh (a couple times) my suitcase. Thankfully traffic was about as expected, so I had plenty of time to check my bag at the curb and continue on through security. While we boarded on time, there were a couple delays in taking off and landing, though somehow we seemed to get into Dallas-Fort Worth about when we were supposed to. After picking up my suitcase from the baggage claim, I headed outside to get picked up by my new teammates, Molly and Jeffry. From the first 5 minutes together, we got along great. The three of us stopped by a local Mexican restaurant for some lunch, and then hit I-20. Six-ish hours later, we arrived in Midland, TX.
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| Yep, that's Midland! And the big open corner just to the upper left of Midland is New Mexico =) |
Once we checked in, we had a couple errands to run. We found a FedEx to ship some stuff back to the MW office, then stopped at Walmart to grab bread, cheese, lunch meat, Pringles, Mic Ultra and other necessities for the weekend (to save money instead of eating out every meal). On our way back to the hotel, we stopped at Jason's Deli-- a first for me!-- for dinner. Mmmm so good! After dinner, we tossed a few beers in our rolling cooler and headed out into the warm, starry night for some poolside chatter before bed.
--Friday 7/29--
First thing in the morning, we went downtown Midland to set up our full event site for the 3-day Blues fest and met our super awesome Verizon contact, JC. Once Molly, Jeffry and I finished assembling all the pieces of our site, we had a couple hours to kill until we had to be back for the evening. I took a little nap and freshened up, then the three of us met up and went back downtown for the first day of the Tall City Blues Fest. We handed out premiums (koozies, mostly), answered questions and demo'ed phones & tablets for consumers. That night when we got back to the hotel, we made some sandwiches for lunch the next day, threw a few more beers into the cooler and spent another night hanging out by the pool.
--Saturday 7/30--
It was a long day at the Tall City Blues Fest. We weren't super close to the stages so we didn't have as many people coming through as we would've liked. But it was fun to hear all the blues music from the main and community stages! It was SUPER hot-- somewhere around 103 degrees-- but luckily most of the day was pretty cloudy and fairly windy. I guess Midland gets a lot of wind and hasn't had rain in about a year. Yikes! At one point, the sky got super dark and felt like it was going to storm big time. Instead of some thunder, lightning and rain, we got a mini dust storm. We all threw on sunglasses and did our best to avoid it, but we did end up having to clean everything off again afterwards-- there was a layer of brown dust on every surface and device of our event site. To keep cool throughout the day, we'd use the air conditioned restroom (and browse the little craft fair inside the Midland Center) and get the yummy Italian ice from this sweet older man. It was a fun little festival, lots of families and tasty-smelling food vendors. Later, once we'd closed up for the night, JC took Molly, Jeffry and me to dinner at a local Mexican restaurant called Abuelo's. It was delicious and all of us ate WAY more than we should have :) I got the three enchilada dinner, with one beef, one chicken and one spinach enchilada. Soooo good! After dinner, we went back to lounge (in our food comas) by the pool with the last few of our beers and some iTunes.
--Sunday 7/31--
The last day of the Tall City Blues Fest was a little slower. It was a vendor-optional day, and the few vendors who remained for the third day had set up inside the air conditioned Midland Center. Once the event was over and we had torn down our event site, we said goodbye to our new friend JC and headed back to the hotel, where we spent the rest of the afternoon laying out by the pool. Even though I put on plenty of SPF 15 and kept reapplying SPF 4, I got fried like a lobster! But it was fun to just relax and work on our tans :) Eventually we got cleaned up and hopped in the car for a mini road trip-- to New Mexico! None of us had been there before and it was only about an hour away, so we all agreed it would be a worthwhile way to spend the evening. After taking pictures next to the "Welcome to New Mexico" and "Welcome to Texas" signs, we were super hungry for dinner. We stopped at Pizza Hut, but the salad bar was totally picked over and our server informed us they were out of breadsticks and all crusts besides thin crust so we peaced outta there. Luckily there was a Huddle House (like a Waffle House) just down the street, so we ate there. It was actually pretty good! We split a basket of mozzarella sticks and I had not expected them to be so tasty! We had a fun time in the car on the way home and then we got back to our rooms to pack up and call it a night.
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