Days 9-11 of 13 (+?): Texas

The Journey continues. This time we are missing our corporate Lear jet, as well as Sarah and Paul. We meet early at the airport to check our luggage and go through security...things that have been rendered foreign to us previously.

After the flight, we drive from the George Bush Airport in Houston to Stafford, TX. I've asked myself to pass the following message along to the State of Texas from my mouth, "Your roads and tolls suck!"

Oddly enough, with our track record of driving, we made it there without a single missed turn! AMAZING! We had one car this time, so Rich and I got to see the navigation chaos up close instead of just following and wondering what they are doing. Here is how it works. The director is driving. As I said earlier, I thought he was the problem, but we found out later it was the camerman, Rich. So Rich (the cameraman...I'll refer to Rich the actor by his self-given nickname, "Draggin'") sits shotgun and has the google map. He gets easily distracted by stuff outside or by his own stories. Dan the sound guy sits behind them with a handheld GPS system. GPS! He bought this because of how bad they are with directions. But, they still don't listen as much as they should. Regardless, we get to the hotel with zero problems.

After a meal and sleep we pack up to head to the branch of the store we're shooting for. It's Texas, and it's warm. I didn't sleep well because I'm coming down with a cold. The first shoot they want to set up doesn't require either of us...this ends up meaning a two hour nap in the van. Awesome. So the shoot didn't really start until 10:00am...but we would be hitting two locations during the day.

We finish at our first location and head to the second. Rich and I get to meet AJ Foyt, Jr...four time Indy 500 winner. We're shooting at his garage. There are about 9 indy cars in there...Rich got to sit in one! Neither of us are sports fans...and racing is somehow included in sports. We also meet his newest driver, Felipe Giaffone (I think that is his name). We're just happy to meet him...but it isn't a big deal to us. Later I find out Deanna told Rebecca H. about us meeting him and she flipped out and called her dad. He's big news.

Enter Black Friday. The weather went from warm to cold and windy really fast, and then we headed out to a new hotel closer to the airport. In comes the usual driving. I'll say we took five wrong turns, and I might be missing some. We kept turning too early...all the while, Dan was saying "we need to go down further according to the GPS". He was right.

We ate. Slept. And shot some stuff at the airport...then hoped on the Commercial flight home.

We have at least one day of driving to the last(?) location and one day of shooting. There may be one more thing after that, but I think next week's 1.5 days will be the end of this job.

It has been great.

PS. I'm watching The Colbert Report on Comedy Central right now and he has referred to Oregon as "California's Canada" for the second time now.