I'm back from Oregon, and thank god we made it. It was pretty much the worst work trip I've made so far, since I've been in this profession. It started out Friday, when we were supposed to fly from Birmingham to Chicago at 7:25 a.m. But as you may or may not know, Chicago had a snowstorm on Friday. And since Chicago is one of the biggest airport hubs in the country, if not the biggest, then the storm was affecting pretty much every flight on Friday. We ended up getting re-routed through Tampa (yes, we flew east on our way to Oregon), and we left for Tampa at 11:30 a.m., four hours after we were supposed to have departed for Chicago. All the flights out of Tampa were also on a multi-hour delay and we left Tampa at 5:30 p.m., made a short stopover in Albuquerque, and then landed in Portland at about 10 p.m. Pacific Time. We rented three 12-passenger vans (one of which I had to drive) and got to the hotel in Corvallis at 1 a.m. Pacific, which felt like 3 a.m. to us. We'd almost traveled for 24 hours. Not to mention the drive from Portland to Corvallis was sort of windy & very foggy. Not fun.

Saturday was okay. We got to sleep in, and ate at a Mexican joint for lunch, then had practice from 7-9 p.m. Sunday was awful. We got up early for a 9 a.m. shoot-around, and got demolished by Oregon State, 82-39. OSU led 20-0 before we even scored a basket. It was really not cool.

Monday was okay, although we ran late the whole time and I was really afraid we'd miss our flight. And considering we were on the last flight into Birmingham, if we missed it, we'd be spending the night somewhere. But we made it, and landed in B'ham about 11:30 p.m. Monday night, and boy was it great to be home. Oregon was beautiful but the trip really wasn't very well planned. There was so much fun stuff we could have done if it was better organized. But what's done is done.