Oh, what a Grandview!

So, as those of you who are loyal to blog reading know, I was down in Texas recently for a conference. Well, it got off to a slow, but not unexpected start. We left about an hour late, since Dr. Kolar has 4 kids, need I say more? But, because we were driving down to Austin, that didn't really matter.
We arrived in Austin at 8 PM. This fact is significant only because I thought it was late enough that there wouldn't be a long wait at Pappadeux, where we had planned to eat. Thirty to forty-five minutes! So, we went to Pappasitos (next door) instead.
We arrived at the conference Monday morning a little late ... not that the planery lecture was anything we wanted to listen to anyway. Dr. Kolar and Dr. Dresback (Kendra) were back to back to start off the morning session (there were 29 concurrent sessions scattered around the Austin Convention Center, which might be the worst location for such a large conference. Since they were both giving presentations, they shipped me off to take notes on a talk by Dr. Carey, since he was talking about adaptive grids ... pertinent to the proposal Dr. Kolar is submitting this Friday. The talk was not very good (in my opinion), as it turns out.
The set-up was odd, at best. The convention center is pretty big, and they had rooms on two floors. Unfortunately, the walkway is around the outside of the rooms, rather than in the center, which would allow you to move from room to room more efficiently ... it took me 10 minutes to walk from the room where the shallow water section was to the room where Carey was talking. That isn't the only strange feature. The main escalators go from the 1st floor to the 4th floor, with no stops on 2 and 3. Then, there is one elevator that stops at 1, 2, and 4, and another that stops at 1, 3, and 4. Luckily, Monday afternoon there were cookies for snacks, so I was able to get enough calories in my system for the half mile trek to a different section.
Later Monday afternoon, we stopped by the corporate sponsors room to explore and enter a raffle for door prizes (signed technical books and Texas stuff - boots and a Stetson). Of particular interest was Carey's book on adaptive grids. The drawing was occuring the next morning, so we had to be somewhat on-time, or so we thought ... you had to be present to win.
Monday evening consisted of dinner with the Dr.'s and Jay and Ethan (from ND - where Casey is going for his PhD) at The Old Pecan Street Cafe, or something like that, on 6th Street. 6th St. didn't impress me that much. Everyone else had wine ... I had diet pepsi. Wine ... yuck!!! So, Nicole's idea about drinking more wine isn't going to work with me. It's not my cup of tea. Oh wait, I'm not all that fond of tea. Ok, bad cliche. Anyway, after dinner, we walked down towards the bridge where all the bats live. Clint (a prof at UT that Dr. Kolar works with) says 20 million bats live between the piers underneath the top of the bridge. At sun down, they fly out. It would have been more exciting if we'd gotten closer to the bridge, but we could still see them flying out and a large number of them flew past us (within 5 feet) ... and we saw a raccoon walk by on his way into a parking garage - I'm not sure what he was going to do in there. Apparently, the bridge had to be fortified to accomodate the bats ... even at a few ounces, 20 million add up to a lot of lbs of dead weight, even though they are alive ... nevermind.
Tuesday, we got to the conference early. As it turned out, the drawing was 15 minutes late, allowing a number of people to get entries into the box after they should have been able to (I wasn't happy about that). One book early, "Randy Kolar" was called, so he got a green book instead of the purple one he wanted. Neither Kendra nor I heard our names called. However, Dr. Kolar was able to pressure the winner of the purple book into trading with him, after the guy realized that the types of grids discussed in the book weren't pertinent to his research. Then, after a slow morning session and lunch at the food court at Whole Foods (apparently the Whole Foods corporate headquarters is above the Whole Foods store in downtown Austin). The complex is pretty impressive. They have their own parking garage, and it is quite large. The store is big and the food court is huge. They have coffee, gelato, smoothie, sandwich, pizza, and oriental counters and different open areas with various things. Pretty crazy. About 2, we headed out, with a 5-6 hour drive ahead of us.
No, of course that's not the end of the story ... the drive from Texas to OK is always the most interesting part of the story, right? We made it out of Austin, despite a wrong turn (I didn't do it!) ... and even made it to through Waco without incident. However, soon after we got onto I-35W headed towards Ft. Worth, Kendra - who had assumed driving duties of Dr. Kolar's car - noticed the engine temperature rising. I then noticed that the AC wasn't working. We decided to exit at the next convenient location ... Kendra noticed the power steering no longer worked ... and the engine temp was into the red (it was 95 outside). Dr. Kolar's guess was that a belt had broken, which perturbed him a little since he'd been told recently by his mechanic that the belts were fine. It looked like he was correct, until the mechanic showed up and determined that the belt was fine, it was the bearings on one of the tension rod things that was the culprit ... the lack of tension resulted in the belt coming off track ... resulting in the AC, water pump, power steering, etc. to malfunction. Whereas a belt would be easy to fix, the actual problem was a little more involved. Luckily, we were able to get a rental car a couple hours later ... abandoning Dr. Kolar's car in Grandview, TX. About 10:15 PM, we arrived back in Norman ... just in time to go to bed!
Do I really want to go back down to Texas in less than two weeks?