Orange Beach travelblog goes on despite OU/Texas SEC news
[ad_1]
There is bad timing, there is horrible timing and then there is my 2021 vacation. We were scheduled to head out Thursday. The day of the NBA Draft (ouch). But I have been adrift in other NBA Drafts; the Thunder took Terrance Ferguson in the 2017 first round, while I watched from a Residence Inn on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Turned out much better for me than for the Thunder. The NBA Draft is one thing. The Southeastern Conference voting to admit the Sooners and Longhorns is quite another. And that also went down Thursday, as the OU/Texas odyssey was brought to a boil. Historic day. Historic, historic day. Not a day to be taking my own personal tour of SEC Country. But while I have a great job, I have an even better family, so no way was I delaying liftoff for Orange Beach, Alabama. Still, I’m excited about the ScissorTales blog we launched in March. I don’t want it to go dormant for a week. So I’m incorporating my traditional travelblogs into ScissorTales, and that also gives me a chance to keep providing a platform to read about Bill Hancock’s Olympic adventure. Heck, I’ll probably throw in a thing or two about sports during the week, too. But I’ll be leading with the travelblog, which sometimes I think is more popular than my sports writing. Tramel: Will OU and Texas be lame ducks long in the Big 12 before heading to SEC? Anyway, Thursday and Friday, we meandered our way to the south of Alabama, spending nights in the SEC strongholds of Jackson, Mississippi, and Mobile, Alabama. In about a 30-hour span, we touched down in five SEC states. Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and Oklahoma. Yep, sounds strange. Maybe that will change. We had a couple of great Italian dinners on the way and stopped in on Laurel, Mississippi, home of “Hometown” fame on HGTV. Drove through a huge swatch of Louisiana freeways and Mississippi countryside. All the while I tried to monitor the events in Norman, Austin and Birmingham, which hosts the SEC offices, as we’ll soon enough need to know. I missed an OU podcast, but thanks to cell phones and hot spots, I wasn’t much disconnected. I made and took phone calls. I listened to the first hour of the NBA Draft while having dinner Thursday night in Monroe, Louisiana, then listened to the next two hours driving east on Interstate 20 and finished up the draft in my Jackson hotel room. I wrote before leaving home Thursday and finished up at various stops in Oklahoma and Texas. Then wrote Friday in the hotel room before everyone awakened, then again on the streets of Laurel. By the time we hit Orange Beach, I’ll be mostly caught up, and Jenni Carlson will do the heavy lifting for a week on Oklahoman columns. Hectic, but we’ve had fun already. We ate dinner in Monroe at Geno’s, a checkered-tablecloth place in an old house. Trish the Dish just found it via the interwebs; she’s got a knack for that. She found a cool place in Cookeville, Tennessee, back in April. Same as Thursday, we just pulled off and hit a home run. Geno’s has been in business since 1964. Started out as a barbeque joint but quickly morphed into Italian, but the spaghetti sauce has a hint of BBQ. Not that I would know. I had Catfish Rosalie, sort of an etouffee knockoff. It was outstanding. Fun place. Quaint and small and perfect for our party of seven. Our daughter Haley and her family have joined us, so we’ll have a great time. Friday, we drove down to Laurel. The Dish and I went to Laurel last summer during the pandemic. Laurel has become a tourist destination due to HGTV’s “Hometown,” which starts Ben and Erin Napier, who are remaking Laurel one house at a time. It’s a charming show and a rather charming town. Sort of a small-town “Fixer Upper.” The Napiers have a mercantile and a general store, the latter adjacent to Ben’s woodshop. Plus it’s easy to find many of the houses they’ve renovated. Last year, we saw Ben working in his shop. This year, we actually saw Erin and her two small children taking a walk on a neighborhood sidewalk. Laurel is not a place you want to go and spend a week. But for a day or two, it’s a place that can make your wife quite happy. The Dish and Haley found all kinds of good shops. And we had an early dinner at Mimmo’s Italian Bistro, a place featured on the show, and it was tremendous. I had another seafood past dish — Seafood Pescatore — and it was full of all kinds of good stuff, including muscles and calamari, squid and shrimp. Really good. The others had pizza or pasta, and everyone was quite pleased. We drove the two hours on down to Mobile and checked into the Airport Marriott, which has great weekend rates, since it’s a business hotel. The girls always get a charge out of a big hotel. We stayed on the 10th floor, but it’s not like Mobile has a ton of great views. The hotel was full of baseball teams. I asked around, and Mobile is hosting the Babe Ruth World Series, for 16- to 18-year-olds. They’re playing at Hank Aaron Stadium, which from 1997-2019 hosted Mobile’s AA team in the Southern League. The Southern League moved out of Mobile, but Henry Aaron Stadium looks like a cool, modern stadium with one of one of the all-time great names. Aaron grew up in Mobile. I hope those 17-year-olds appreciate playing in an event named for one of the two greatest home run hitters, and a stadium with the same acclaim. By Saturday night, we’ll be on Orange Beach. And hoping the college football news slows for awhile.
Bill Hancock’s Olympic adventure
Another Olympiad has arrived, and you know what that means – daily dispatches from everyone’s favorite Oklahoman, Bill Hancock. The Hobart native who has carved a career as director of college sports’ biggest events – the Final Four for decades, now the College Football Playoff since its 2014 inception – is a long-time Olympic volunteer, going back to the 1984 (summer) and 2006 (winter) games. Hancock writes a daily letter to family and friends, giving them an inside look at Olympic life. He and his wife, Nicki, are in Tokyo. “July 30, Friday: (Please excuse the typos and bad writing in this friendly message to family members. They are kind and so will not object to sloppiness.) “Commute by bus from the Hotel Sunroute Ginza through the thrilling city, then across the graceful Rainbow Bridge — new record today, 17 minutes to the Media Transport Mall, then seven more easy minutes on a different bus to the Main Press Center. “The MPC and IBC (International Broadcast Center) are in the splendid Tokyo Big Sight convention center. You could store a whole lot of hay in here. “Breakfast: Fruit cocktail, carrots, corn, three tasty little sausages, eggs, roll with butter and jelly and BPSE (the best potato salad ever.) “Rain this morning. Real, hard, serious rain. Even the rain is fun at the Olympics. “Note from Stillwater: ‘As a follow-up to my mother’s question, my mother-in-law has asked for the recipe for the BPSE.’ “If you pass a subway entrance at the right time, you get to see dozens of earnest young men exiting, all dressed in the same outfit: white shirts and black pants, like a junior high marching band. “Note from Columbus — ‘I had the privilege of meeting Red Skelton on his way to a performance at the convention center where he ducked into a meeting room in full Clem Kadiddlehopper, to the surprise and delight of convention goers that have treasured that memory like I have all these years later.’ “Note from Lawrence — ‘Kansai means Western. The plains area to the west of Osaka is referred to as Kansai. Area includes: Nagoya, Hiroshima, etc.’ “Japanese major league baseball teams are divided into East and West conferences, I believe. Unlike American baseball, most teams (not all) are not named for their cities. They are named after the large corporation that owns them. For example: Nippon Ham Fighters, Hanshin Tigers, Yomiuri Giants (named after the Daily Yomiuri and Yomiuri Shinbun, two major Tokyo newspapers.) If you go to a newsstand, you can buy the English version of the Daily Yomiuri. It is an excellent newspaper. I always enjoy reading it. It’s like the old Herald-Tribune in Paris. Very cosmopolitan. “Note from Atlanta — ‘Another historical fact about the judo arena Budokan: While the Beatles and Ali may have appeared there, Cheap Trick recorded a live album there during a 1978 concert: CHEAP TRICK LIVE AT BUDOKANh. Rolling Stone magazine considers it one of the greatest live rock albums of all time and ranked it 426 on their list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. In 2020 the album was selected by the Library of Congress for addition to the National Recording Registry.’ “Volunteer du jour: Aya. Glasses. Small and kind and helpful. Trying very hard to do the right thing. “Remember, when it’s 7 a.m. Monday in River City, Iowa, it’s 9 p.m. in Tokyo. “Covid Countermeasure of the day – Before traveling to Japan, we had to create a record of everyone we’d be in close contact with. Nicki and I put each other. It was a sweet moment. (I didn’t know I should list all the photographers and journalists who squeeze into the bus from the transport mall to the MPC each afternoon.) “DX 6 – nothing this morning; trampoline gymnastics starting at 1 p.m. “Today I asked one of our colleagues to please change the channel to ‘Get Smart.’ Would you believe we don’t get that channel? “We don’t have access to any of the NBC telecasts. So you’re seeing more of the Olympics at home than we are here. Well, we do see lots live, but without commentary since our monitors are usually muted. But you folks at home don’t get to ride over the magnificent Rainbow Bridge two or four times each day. All in all, I’d much rather be us. “I do try to turn up the volume to unsafe levels when our national anthem plays….or Great Britain’s….or Canada’s. “Yesterday we heard the faux anthem that they’re playing for Russian gold-medal winners. It’s an anthem-sized snippet Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor. (We had a 78-rpm version of it when I was a child; I played it until the grooves wore down, much to the joy of my parents who were pleased that they were raising a nerd who loved classical music.) “Noticing the USA didn’t win a tennis medal for the first time in modern games caused me to remember 1988 when I was the press officer for tennis in its first re-appearance in the games. I didn’t know any of them before, of course, but got to know the players reasonably well. Chris Everett, Pam Shriver, Zina Garrison, Brad Gilbert, Tim Mayotte, Robert Seguso and Ken Flach were all excited to represent their country. Seems like Shriver and Garrison won the women’s doubles, and Flach and Seguso won men’s doubles. Mayotte lost in the gold-medal match. “Comment from Liberty – ‘Good to see that the Rice Bowl hasn’t sold its naming rights.’ Response to Liberty – Yes, “Minute” wasn’t interested. ‘Brown’ also declined. So did ‘Jerry’ and ‘Condoleezza.’ ‘Bean Sand’ is still pending. “I need to say this: even for those of us who love LE TOUR de FRANCE, the Olympics is the greatest sporting event in the world. “Best name in the Olympics? That would be Gable Dan Steveson, USA wrestler. Reigning NCAA champion from the U. of Minnesota. How the heck did his parents know he would grow up to be fabulous wrestler? “Second best name in the Olympics: Tennys Sandgren who — you guessed it — is on the USA tennis team. He played at Tennessee and was named after his Swedish great-grandfather. “Japan Fact that surely must be true because somebody told me: Soccer is the second-most popular sport in Japan, after baseball. “We took the bus to the Ariake Tennis Center and watched a match on the lovely center court, then good bronze-medal doubles on equally lovely Court 1. Center Court is like Wimbledon without the strawberries and cream. “We checked out the whole place, and made volunteers happy by accepting a ride in one of their golf carts from Center Court to Court 1. Cicadas clicked away in the trees that grace the complex, reminding us that August is coming back home. “The air was thick. Soon enough, thunder peeled and lightning flashed and we hoped we would get to watch the organizers close the stadium’s roof. But the storm went away. “We walked from the tennis complex back to the MPC. We went at our usual glacial walking pace and it took only 20 minutes. “Nicki and I shared an Asahi gold beer this afternoon, thanks to the kindness of a newspaper agency that behaves much more energetically than a gray lady should. The can said it is the original beer for Japan Pride. ‘Asahi The Gold has excellent richness, truly refreshing drinkability and satin smoothness.’ Given all that, how could we go wrong? “Dinner: A kind soul brought about 40 burgers from Shake Shack to our office. We were delighted. I only needed a root beer float to send myself clear to nirvana. “Stan, one of the four drivers who cart athletes from their venues or the Village to the MPC for interviews, was free tonight and took us back to the Hotel Sunroute Ginza. My phone fell out of my pocket and Stan rescued it from the seat before we went away. ‘This is the fifth phone that has been left in my car today,’ he said. “When Nicki and I were looking for noodles at Family Mart, an unmasked young Japanese woman asked if she could help us. As much as we enjoy working out language differences, it’s comforting to encounter a Japanese person who speaks English. You know, like finding a taco in Iceland. “We said yes, we were trying to figure out which noodles to try. ‘This is the pasta section,’ she said politely. (That’s a redundancy.) She walked around to the next row which was half-full of sundry noodles. We picked two and thanked her. “I didn’t ask why she wasn’t wearing a mask. Was she some kind of beautiful virus-spreading noodle-terrorist? ‘Save the noodles!’ “Oh, my goodness, what a privilege to be here! Every day is an adventure. Sayonara, for now.”
[ad_2]