The longest day...

Day 2 Saturday 29th May

Unsurprisingly the Rat factor rears its head again as the taxi Mark has booked for 05:20 fails to turn up. Frantic phone calls eventually elicit “its on its way mate...” and we somehow get the train to Manchester Airport where we meet up with Liam and Dawn and check in.

I thought that I'd do some of the blog and find the world's supply of wifi signals, which is great if you could actually log onto any of them. No such thing as a free lunch. But ha! The iPhone comes with free BT Openzone and...I'm in! Which is great until I find out, that while I can type in the post title it won't let me enter the box where you actually type in the post. Bloody marvelous! I try and think how the Rat factor may have come into play, but can't rationalise how. I blame him anyway 'cos it makes me feel better!

Don't you just love waiting around at airports! Mark, Dawn and Liam at O'Hare.











We get on the plane and set off on the 8.5 hour flight to Chicago and O'Hare Airport. We spend 2 hours standing in queues and eventually get checked in for the 2 hour flight to Oklahoma City. With a big chunk of the 6.5 hours wait for the connection already having been killed going through the various checks, we find a bar and have some beer and a chicken burger. An uneventful flight on a 50 seater to Will Rogers Airport follows (nice and roomy if you're a pygmy) and have course there is no sign of any of our checked luggage. Ratty!!!

We eventually find it chained up in a corner, it had clearly been smuggled across on an earlier flight. We get checked in to the Wingate Inn, convince ourselves we are feeling “perky” and set off to walk to the Rodeo Club 2 minutes down the road.

You're required to show your passport, to get in (don't ask me why) and of course Mark has brought his driving license. After some lengthy “negotiation” (they have guns and we had followed the instructions on the door that said “strictly no weapons”) we get in to find we had missed the 25 cent on bottles offer by 2 minutes. I'm feeling charitable and choose not to kick a Rat when he's down. We all get stamped in with an invisible stamp and have some beer and play some pool.

The last time I was here was in 2006 and it is still the same – a big cavernous building, with a dance floor with girls doing some unfathomable synchronised dancing and of course the full size rodeo cage...I don't think Mark was too impressed but a couple of beers and watching cowboys trying to kill themselves on giant psychotic bulls cheered him up. Yeehaa!

Memories of 6'”4 cowboys in Stetsons and little blond gals is short miniskirts proved to be only partially correct. They have their fair share of biffas and we saw the black guy from Blazing Saddles. It REALLY was him. Probably.

Bed by 12:30 hoping that 26 hours without sleep has kick started our systems onto Central Time (GMT -6), but as I'm typing this at 05:30 it clearly hasn't worked. And I'm typing it up off line as do you think the “high speed broadband wired and wireless internet” actually works? RATTY!!!