Busting in San Antonio – The Climb #119

Saturday 20th May 2017

Today felt the price of yesterday. After getting to bed at around 3:30am, I was up at 8am to get packed and ready to leave. I’ve noticed how tired I am but just how grumpy I am. I get like this when I’m truly exhausted. In many ways it reminds me of my old Action-Figure days. I hate being like this and had to apologise to people a few times.
This wasn’t the only reason I’m in a bit of a bad mood this evening. I was filming the vlog with the rode mic today to try and improve audio quality, only to find a couple of key clips had no sound and couldn’t be used. Most of these are due to schoolboy errors that awake Adrian would not have made.
Our target today was in San Antonio. There seemed to be two lines of storms, one far, far to the south of Texas, and another just north of San Antonio.
We were late leaving. No-one’s fault. I think we were just all feeling a bit lethargic due to yesterday’s massive 2400km journey.
We needed to get a few things from Walmart before making the journey down to San Antonio where we hit a lot of heavy traffic. San Antonio also seems deceptively close. It feels like it should be a couple of hours away, not the good 7-8 that it took us.
As a result, we arrived after the storms had fired. The southern storms were doing a few interesting things but the northern ones that we’d hoped might have done some things, despite initially looking promising, fizzled out.
There was a temptation to go for the southern storms, especially as we’d already driven 7 hours, but it was another 2 hours by which time they would have largely fizzled out with the night. Plus we need to be in Amarillo tomorrow morning, which is another deceptively long drive away.
So we went to dinner and discussed our options.
I found us a nice little Mexican restaurant in San Macros where the food was good and plentiful. I also had a massive magarita with a tone of alcohol in it. I’d hoped it would take the edge off my grumpiness but it didn’t.
As I’m not one of the drivers on this trip, I’m responsible for finding and booking hotels. After yesterday’s mistake of booking too early, this evening we waited until we’d decided that we would call the day a bust and head as far north as we could ahead of another long drive up to Amarillo tomorrow. So we opted for San Angelo, that despite looking local was a 3 hour drive.
My first hotel booked out as I was trying to do it, so I found us a decent motel for $60 a night. It’s not bad and I hope to be able to get to be before 2am.
My big problem is that a combination of my mistakes and lack of content from today, resulted in a very crap vlog. I should have shot more footage, but even then, there really wasn’t much in the way of footage to shoot. Tomorrow should be more exciting, plus I shouldn’t make the same mistakes that killed the audio on those few key clips.
But like the vlog, today’s The Climb is a bit short of content. It was just another day of travel only for us to arrive too late to go for the deeper target when our storm fell apart over our heads.
So I’m going to keep this short as well and get some sleep so I can be more bright-eyed and bushy-tailed tomorrow. There’s even a chance we could end up in Colorado which will be our 8^th state on this trip.
If you want to follow more of my journey, then be sure to check me on my social channels. Likewise, if you’d like me to expand on any point mentioned above, please say so in the comments.