Day 2: Maryville, MO

And the excitement continues. The morning started slow. If this town is anything, it's laid back and relaxed. With not a whole lot of work to do at the stadium, Aaron and I roamed the 'downtown' district looking for a decent restaurant to serve us lunch. What we found was that nothing, on the outside, looked like a decent restaurant. We decided on a place called A&G Restaurant, which looked more like a hunting lodge than anything else from the road.

Fortunately, we learned here not to judge a book by its cover. The food was fantastic. I had my very first Monte Cristo. For those of you who don't know what a Monte Cristo is, don't feel bad. I will include the recipe so that you don't have to ask the ignorant question. And by recipe, I mean dumbed down description. It's just a complex sandwich. You take some bread, throw on some sliced ham and turkey along with swiss cheese, and then close the sandwich. It is dipped in batter and lightly fried, then dusted with powdered sugar. Served with a raspberry dipping sauce, this Belgian treat is absolutely worth the food-induced itis that is inevitably included in its price. Your task: find a common side dish that goes well with this brunchy sandwich. Fries weren't the trick.

From there, we headed over to the stadium and met the ESPN2 production team. They were friendly enough compared to your average television production team. Generally, they are a grumpy, no-nonsense group. After several hours of waiting for their video guy to hook us up with a line feed so that we could test the replay system, we gave up and left for the hotel and a quick nap (in our own respective rooms of course). Our replay official had made his grand entrance to Maryville, so we joined up with him later and headed to the all-staff meeting. This is where things got fun.

These Division II programs are so excited to be on national television, and so inexperienced with the minor trivialities involved in the general operation of a televised game. We actually fielded questions from the athletic director.

For dinner, we returned to A&G with our distinguished replay official. He promptly began hitting on our bartender/server, who quickly spurned his advances with mention of an intelligent, controlling daughter, aged 7-going-on-24.

Nothing more to report, for now. Hopefully something good is on basic cable tonight. In the meantime, I hope this obnoxious alarm ringing in the Super 8 goes away soon. I think dogs everywhere are howling.