1:43 p.m.
I-40, Ark. — 6:30 came early this morning.

But six and a half hours, maybe three hours of sleep and one 44-ounce Dr. Pepper later I'm wide awake and back on the bus.

And it's just Thursday. The entire trip felt like a weekend. Maybe I'm still in football mode or something. Or it could just be that during the school year we don't usually make three-day trips for basketball. For some reason we always make a day-trip out of it, thinking we might actually attend a class or something the next morning.

Going to class after returning from Cleveland, Miss. at 4 a.m. just never seems real appealing. But going to Cleveland, Miss. for a day just to catch a couple basketball games doesn't appeal to many people. Hell, going to Cleveland, Miss. for any reason for any period of time doesn't appeal to just a whole bunch of folks.

Anyways, I figured I would wrap up my posts on the Evansville trip with just a collection of random little tidbits from the mid-week excursion.

Yesterday marked the first time in my sportswriting life that I had to sit among the rafters at a basketball venue. That's not really a bad thing, you get a much better look at the action from up there. At the press table there can be a number of obstructions depending on the arena.

Refs, players, coaches, cheerleaders, mascots, kids running around – lots of obstacles.

Even though it was interesting to be up that high and provided an interesting angle for some photographs, I'm a much bigger fan of being near the action. But because I never photographed a basketball game from the ceiling I decided to do that the first half to see what happens and then roll to the floor for the second half.

And despite the court at Evansville not allowing for much room for photographers, it's safe to say I prefer it down there.

Not often do you get an eye-level view of the scoreboard or stadium lights.

Roberts Stadium, UE's facility, is pretty nice despite it's apparent old age. There is a nice historical section along the concourse. It's a very comprehensive little history section. Of course there's the Purple Aces history and all that, but there's also some Indiana high school history. Interesting stuff and displayed nicely.

There are also a number of concession and novelty stands, but only one concession stand was open yesterday. And it wasn't featuring the full menu. After skipping lunch to put in work on getoffus.com, and discovering there was no meal for the media, Josh and I had to fend for ourselves. With transportation options an obvious problem we elected to sample some of the fine concessions. Especially since we noticed the Steak Dog on the menu. Well, upon ordering the Steak Dog it was revealed that the only hot dogs in rotation Wednesday night were the foot-long and polish sausage variety. Bummer.

Another thing I noticed is that we seem to work harder on our basketball trips than football trips. I'm really not sure why, because basically we have a game story and photo gallery for every athletic event we cover. There shouldn't be that much of a difference. Maybe it just so happens that more interesting things come out of a basketball shooutaround than a football walkthrough.

Or it could be that our usual big basketball trip is the GSC Tournament when we straight pull out all the stops and cover every game.

Whatever the case, we don't get paid enough for what we do. Not even close. But it's fun and better than sitting around the house.

After venturing inside from the out of doors last night I was curious to see what the temperature difference between Evansville and Conway were at the time. Well, I was shocked to see that it was just one degree of difference. According to AccuWeather.com it was 27 in Conway, 26 in Evansville.

I didn't check the wind chill, though. But I have a feeling Evansville's wind chill would've won that battle. It was frigid.

I've also discovered that it's extremely hard to fit a 6-foot-7 frame into any sort of comfortable position to sleep on a chartered bus. It's just not possible. I may have got a few minutes of sleep here and there, but every time the bus slowed down, I'd be flying off the seats. So then it was off to find another semi-comfortable position to get another 10 minutes of sleep.

Finally I gave up and just stayed up.

The new Bad News Bears is hilarious. I'm glad folks put DVD players in buses. Great idea.

I think I've got just one more thing for you. The St. Louis Dispatch may be the ugliest major metro daily newspaper ever designed. It's horrible. Not that anyone really cares about that, but I had to make mention of it.

We've made excellent time on the way back today and that is exciting. When we land in Conway I'm going to post this entry and head out to my hometown of Glen Rose (it's a small community between Malvern and Benton) to celebrate some Christmas.

Exciting times.

Alright, we're 39 miles away from C-Town. I'm going to go enjoy the end of this bus ride.

Merry Christmas.