Away Game

I’m in a hotel in Dayton, Ohio.  My daughter’s color guard outfit is here for the WGI finals – or was here, I guess I should say; they failed to make the cut for the finals, so today they’re just spectators.  This is the last competition for her.  I won't really miss most of it. It's a lot of work. For most competitions, which tend to be held at high schools, even just getting there is tedious - the schools are hard to locate on the map; and parking is usually problematic.  When you get there, the bleachers are usually designed for younger butts than mine, and they're frequently steep (I still worry about falling). But the groups themselves are usually good, and occasionally great.  At WGI, though, the groups are usually great -- easily living up to the 'world' in WGI -- but WGI makes you pay for it, charging for everything, and not nominally, either.  Good riddance.  Okay, being surrounded by excited teenage girls who are mostly all in fantastic shape is rather nice, but having to listen to them chatter as they swarm -- well, a little of that goes a long way. I tease my wife that seeing them makes me wish I was a teen again, but, truth to tell, I don't.  These girls would slay me without thinking twice.   I'll stay the age I am, thanks.

But getting into the finals would have been nice....

Dayton is a bit of a strange city.  This is only the second time that I’ve been here, so I really don’t know much about it.  It feels as if the city is struggling, economically, but you see areas where things are stable, and even some where new things are in place.  Yesterday we had breakfast at a restaurant called Mimi’s, which appears to be owned by the Bob Evans company.  You can’t tell from the restaurant itself; it’s decorated in a sort of Cajun French style.  The food is pretty good.  I was pointing out to my wife that one dish wasn’t ‘four cheese quiche’, it was ‘quatre fromage quiche’.  I said it in French just as the waitress arrived.  She looked at me askance and said ‘you aren’t going to order in French, are you?’  So of course I said “je voudrais café, et une verre du jus….’

The hotel is on the moderately crummy side.  It appears to have been a Holiday Inn, then taken over by Ramada.  I think they tried to upgrade it, but you can clearly see what it used to be.  The two wings of the original open-to-the-air building were roofed over to make one big building, but the stairs are still the same cheap outdoor carpet that you see in a lot of low-to-middle motels.  The room is okay, though they have a major problem with water pressure (I had to let it run for 10 minutes yesterday before getting hot water that faded to lukewarm ten minutes later).  And the restaurant is - meh.  I guess it’s a good rule of thumb that when a motel has been taken over by a different chain, the odds of it being a decent place go down.

Tomorrow we go home.  I asked why we couldn’t go today, and was told that we had to stay to watch the awards tonight, of course!

Of course.