So Many Plans; June 22, 2024

So many plans.

Which one to decide?

It seems to be a weekly struggle for me.

Is this a part of getting older or just that I have too many interests?

It could be both.

Or that I'm not just happy with doing one thing and when I try to combine them, I can't get them all to work together.

My first thought of the weekend was to travel to TAPPS' 7-on-7 and 6-on-6 event at the Heart O' Texas Soccer Complex in Waco.  To make sure I didn't inconvenience TAPPS Associate Director Steve Prud'homme at the last minute, I put in for a credential request on Thursday ( to which he quickly filled).

I also wanted to run the Polish Pickle Run 5K in Bremond too, but I vacillated between whether to stay in Waco or College Station.  

Regardless of where I stayed it was going to be 45 minutes there and back.

If I had stayed in Waco, I didn't have good plans after.  That wasn't good.

In College Station, I would have gone to Temple, Bastrop and then Seguin for a museum, a statue (a new Harriet Tubman traveling exhibit) and a summer collegiate baseball game; however, I got past the 12 noon cutoff for online registration (which I found out after the fact), and that changed it all.

So what I was going to do Friday night before?

I decided to check out a Women's Premier Soccer League match at The Village School on the west side of Houston.

Our race director with the Legacy Capital The Woodlands Marathon, Willie Fowlkes, has been a long-time soccer coach and once explained me the different types of levels of soccer, but basically WPSL is summer collegiate soccer.

It turned out, while looking for what the admission price was going to be, that his daughter, Alexis, was playing for the home team, the Houston Aces (who destroyed the San Antonio Runners, 8-0, after beating them 3-0 two weeks ago in San Antonio).  Go figure.

I reached out to my daughter to see if she might be interested in joining me since she lived close and since she didn't have any plans, she did.  

Great conversation as always.

It turned out that there had been no admission price.  

I had eaten at Chick-Fil-A at Briar Forest and Eldridge Parkway before the match.  

And I made it home in a decent amount of time, but I stayed up a bit trying to map out my Saturday plans.

Before I went to bed I also saw that the author of a new book on Steelers head football coach Mike Tomlin was going to be signing copies at a Half Price Books store in south Austin from 12 noon - 2 p.m.

However, my main game plan was to go to Freeport for Fort Velasco Day and then hit some historical sites and museums in Brazoria County.

I woke up between 5:30 and 6, but basically it was two hours to Bremond so I would have needed to leave by 4:45 a.m.  That was out.

While the good folks who put on the two park runs here in Houston are good, sweet people, I'm not a big fan of the fuss that park run UK created with all of their data issues.

I definitely didn't feel like running three loops at Spindle Tree, but I didn't want to drive down and back to Terry Hershey even though it is an out and back and on concrete.

I made it to the gym to get my elliptical work in - 33-minute weight loss routine (basically four-minute intervals), after getting a small amount of food in me.

When I got back my original plans for Saturday vaporized as I got some things down here at the house and then I made sure that I got my 24-minute, 5,000 meter rowing workout in too.

And after that, I finally made it out of the house before 1 p.m. and my target became the Rosenberg Railroad Museum, which had a "Railroads & American Sports" exhibit.

It was small, but very, very well done.

I have a list of railroad sites to work through, much like so many other lists I have to do or see.

So aside from taking in the Wharton County Courthouse square and all of its surroundings, I made it to the Wharton Train Depot & Museum (the museum part was closed), the Needville (Long Point) Depot and the Fulshear Historic Switch House.

Trying to stay off of the cutthroat freeways, I started to manuever up Fry Road instead of getting up on the Westpark Tollway.

I took Fry all the way to Westheimer when I realized that Westheimer was the location of one of the last two remaining Half Price Books locations in the greater Houston area that I hadn't been to.

I bought a book to make it count - my normal routine, and then I traveled towards home, stopping to eat at Mike and Shelley Ludwig's Chick-Fil-A near the intersection of FM 2920 and Kuykendahl.

It all worked out.

I don't know.  Maybe instead of fretting over a bunch of driving or a long drive and/or getting in late on the return, from going to a ball game with a 7 p.m. start, maybe I should do what I did today:  get in the car and see where it goes!