This kind of got lost in my campaign to redo the front page… lost but not forgotten about.
Heather and I traveled to Kearney Nebraska to watch my brother compete in a Special Olympics bowling event.
The trip started in Des Moines with a little rain. By the time we were 30 minutes down the road, it was snow, but the snow wasn’t sticking and the weather before we left indicated we should drive through it and be in the clear within another 30 minutes. What didn’t show up in the weather report I read, was the second wave of snow that caught us about 40 miles out of Omaha.
It made for easily the worst winter driving Heather and I have seen as a couple. Even with bad conditions, careful deliberate driving was working ok. What wasn’t working ok was the minority of drivers who were not content to stay in a line and use the narrow set of tire tracks that were open. Apparently getting where they were going 2 minutes faster was worth risking lives for.
Once we made it into Omaha, it really was smooth sailing, and we got all the way to Kearney without indecent.
The next morning we had a quick breakfast and headed over to the bowling alley. The most noteworthy thing we found as we came in was that they were not letting the public down onto the lane-level area at all, meaning the kind of wide hallway landing thing behind the lanes was really crowded. Lucky for us, my parent’s and aunt and uncle were already there, and had a spot staked out.
It was great to get to see my family, and it goes without saying I suppose, that Andrew was ecstatic to have us there for the event. After the hellos we found ourselves with plenty of time to chat as the event was a little lethargic getting started. Andrew headed up to his lane and everything looked all set, and then the PA system fired up and we discovered there were lots of announcements before we could get started.
After quite a bit of milling around, the bowling began. Andrew, as it turns out, is actually a pretty good bowler. His only downfall is that he isn’t actually that interested in winning when there are other interesting things going on. In three games, he pretty consistently bowled well every-other frame, meaning the strikes and spares he was getting weren’t having the compounding effect one would hope for.
The on again off again trend held for nearly all of Andrews games, leaving the last frame of the last game as a notable exception. Andrew bowled three strikes in a row! It was a fantastic finish to a morning of bowling.
We headed on to McCook to spend a little time with my parents. Have I mentioned that Heather and I like board games? We got our second chance to teach new players how to play the game St Petersburg, and I would say did a little better at teaching it. We also got in a round of Ticket To Ride. When not engaging in board games, we did get to enjoy some great weather in McCook (a place that seems to always have much warmer weather than we left in Des Moines), and eat at a great local pizza place.
The pizza place is noteworthy I suppose just for the pizza, but the more memorable thing is that it has a view of the switch yard. The yard was busy putting together a train while we ate. Andrew was perhaps 100 times more expressive about the event than I was, but that doesn’t mean that I didn’t also thing it was a great thing to get to watch them push rail cars around while we ate. 🙂
On the drive home, we managed to make connections with some of Heather’s friends from college, missed connections with my sister, and then met up with a good friend of mine from high school before eventually making it back to Des Moines.
All in all, it was a very productive few days!
-Jordan
Nelsons 