The Night We Almost Went to the Ranger Game

Last night we had flashbacks to January - the episode where We Almost Went to the Rodeo. It was one of those days where nothing went right.

Clarke woke up and headed out the door on his way to Dallas for a hearing, only to come right back in the door announcing that he had a flat tire.  He took my car to Dallas and luckily made it to court on time.  Thankfully, my mom was already planning on spending the day with us, so she came over and the kids and I went shopping with her and then we met Clarke at the food court in the mall for lunch and to swap keys so I would have his car key when I called to get his car towed.

Clarke went back to work, and the kids and I came home with my mom.  I called the tow truck (free with our insurance - yea!), they picked up the car, took it to NTB, they called and said it was covered under some road hazard policy we didn't know we had, and it would be $40 (also yea! because we thought it would be a lot more).  My mom took me and the kids to pick the car up, we drove home, we got back in my mom's car and she chauffeured us to downtown to meet Clarke at his office, because we were supposed to meet our friends, Ryan and Abby, and their kids at the Ranger game.

Immediately upon entering the highway, the traffic was AWFUL.  We barely moved for about 20 minutes, exited and tried to get around the traffic, got back on and finally got to the ballpark.  We paid $10 for parking and started the long trek to the entrance. 

Ominous dark clouds filled the sky.  We could have turned around.  But still, we kept walking.  By the time we got to the gates, raindrops were starting to fall.  We got to the ticket window and started asking about tickets.  Don't ask me why we didn't buy our tickets ahead of time.  It's so not like us - we always buy them online.  Somehow we were thinking it was a decade ago when the Rangers were bad and you could go to a random Wednesday game without any issues.  Well - newsflash - it's 2012 and the Rangers are awesome and everyone and their dog and their third cousin and their grandma from Idaho was at the game.  

Anyway, the ticket people offered us tickets that were $45 each for obstructed view seats, $71 each for obstructed view, or $25 each for standing room only.  By this point it was raining hard and we thought we should cut our losses, so we declined the absurdly expensive bad seats and started the loooong walk back to our car.

And it rained on us.  The whole way.  Really hard.  And I was carrying Arden and Clarke was carrying Huston and it took forever to walk back to our car.  And by the time we got to our car it was late and we were hungry and wet and it was not raining quite as hard anymore and we were thinking maybe we should have just stayed at the game.

I asked the parking guy if he would have mercy on us and refund our money.  He told us, "Sorry, I'm closed."  We wondered, "Did you burn the money?  Eat it?  What do you mean, closed?"  But he did offer us a 50% discount the next time if we brought our parking ticket from this game back.  Umm... right.  We're holding our breath on that one.  "Remember us, from that random game where it rained a few weeks ago?  Here's our nondescript brown parking ticket.  You told us to bring it back.  Remember?"

Anyway, here are our rain drenched kiddos.

We pulled into Mama's Pizza.

The kids were clamoring for their dinner (by now it was 8 o 'clock).

I asked Arden to take a picture of me and Clarke with my iphone.  Here's her attempt:

Here's Huston's attempt:

Here's our pizza:

And the view on the way home - not a drop of rain.

The saddest thing is that it was going to be our last time to see Ry and Ab before they leave next week for an indeterminate amount of time to be missionaries overseas.  Far, far away.  :(  I was so sad about that.  And about missing dollar hot dog night.  But mostly about that.

So, Ryan and Abby - WE LOVE YOU! So sorry our poor planning and other circumstances prevented us from hanging out.

And, if you need us, we'll be huddled inside our house.  Not attempting to do anything fun like go to the rodeo or a baseball game.