Road Trip: New Mexico State – From the Bird’s Nest

I’ve always liked going to New Mexico State.

Great climate, great food, and I’ve always found the people there to be friendly and helpful.

As a result, I was looking forward to the trip this past weekend.

It was a beautiful day to fly (unlike the last trip where we were delayed two hours by weather) and there were no issues.  We landed in El Paso and, by the time bags were loaded onto the buses we all arrived at the Doubletree at about 5:00.  We were staying in the downtown area, where I had never stayed before.  There was a AAA ballpark visible from our hotel room.

For those of you that have never been, that El Paso/Las Cruces area (they are about 45 miles apart) has extremely low humidity.  It can get pretty hot during the summer, but the temps drop after the sun goes down.  It’s a little over 3,000 feet in altitude and if you exert yourself you notice the difference.  They only get about 4.5 inches of rain a YEAR.  There’s usually a breeze (sometimes it’s a wind and sandstorms do exist, especially in the spring).  At any rate, it was just gorgeous.

After checking into the hotel, we went to the suite of Athletic Director Scott Farmer, where he holds a small reception for the travel party.  It doesn’t last long, maybe an hour, but it’s a good chance to interact with the other folks who made the flight.  The travel party had reservations, but we (the media folks) weren’t going.

We were going to Carlos and Mickey’s.  Technically, it’s Los Banditos de Carlos and

Mickey’s.  It’s a Mexican restaurant (imagine that) but it’s quite different from any Mexican food you might have here in South Louisiana.  It’s pretty obvious that they cook with green chilies a lot out there in that neck of the woods, because all their food has a pretty good kick to it.  I found out about Carlos and Mickey’s the first time I ever went out there and I was hooked.

We left the hotel around seven.  It was about a ten minute drive and as you might expect on a Friday night, the place was packed.  We had to wait the better part of an hour for a  table.  No problem.  The bar was open.  And, the margaritas were flowing.  You could almost take a bath in one of them, they were so big.

Dinner was a huge hit with everyone.  I’m telling you if you ever go to El Paso and you don’t eat there, shame on you.  If you do eat there, you can thank me later.

Saturday morning after breakfast I had a Payday for dessert.  Even though she wasn’t on the trip, Coach Hudspeth’s wife Tyla made sure I got the candy bar.  It got the Cajuns a win at Texas State and no, we aren’t superstitious.  As many of you know, Tyla is getting ready to have a baby.  I checked in with her a couple of times to see how things were going.  Fortunately, it was all good.

Saturday’s kickoff was scheduled for 6pm, MST.  We always like to be at the stadium four hours before kickoff.  That meant leaving the hotel around 1pm, as it would take a little less than an hour to get to the stadium.  There is a brief stretch of Interstate where it is just a stone’s throw from Juarez, Mexico.  I always get a little sad when I see how people are forced to live.  One shanty shack after another is what we saw.  It also makes me thankful of the country in which I live.

We got to the stadium just before 2pm.  Aggie Memorial Stadium is an old stadium.  There

is no elevator to the press box; rather, it is a very steep ramp that you traverse to get to the media area.  Of course, we have tons of equipment to carry.  Between the altitude, the equipment and the fact I’m an old guy, I was pretty much out of breath when I got to the top.  But the good news was, it would be easier going back down.

We were traveling without our engineer, Matt Gholston and of course, that was going to make equipment setup, shall we say, interesting.  But I give Steve all the credit.  We got out of his way and he set everything up.  But we couldn’t hear ourselves…until we realized Steve never hit the power button.  We laughed about that.

Bill Powers, the NMSU Director of Media Relations met us in our booth and made sure we had everything we needed.  We did.  There were no issues hooking up with our studio (once we turned the power on.)

But then we got a bit of a curve ball.

As you know, our pregame show is two hours long.  The first hour is local, the second is network wide.  As you probably don’t know, it is standard operating procedure to have security come through with bomb sniffing dogs to check the press box.  At UL they do it on Friday and check every room on all three levels.  They can do it on Friday because access to the press box is so limited on gameday.  New Mexico State’s stadium isn’t set up that way.  We were informed the police and the dogs would be there AFTER the first hour of pregame began.  And, naturally we were expected to vacate the press box while that was going on.

We asked what we might be able to do in order to work something out.  The police agreed to let one person remain in our booth, but they were not comfortable simply skipping over that booth.  The dogs would be coming in.  I figured unless they were having a bad day, the dogs wouldn’t be an issue.

But it never came to that.  I looked at our format sheet and in the first hour, there is about a twenty minute window where the show is either live at the studio for a scoreboard update, or it’s material already pre recorded.  We asked if the police would be able to coordinate with us to do the sweep at that time.  They readily agreed.  And, when we went to the commercial break at 4:11pm, we got out of there and let security do its work.

It’s amazing what you can accomplish by working together.

It’s normal that, in the gameday program, there’s a drawing of the officials signals.  New Mexico State uses its human mascot, Pistol Pete, to do theirs.  I have to include this picture.  I found it really funny.

Aggie Memorial Stadium is just beautiful when you’re looking from the press box.  The Organ Mountains are in the background and it’s quite a sight.  New Mexico State doesn’t draw very well.  When you’ve had only four winning seasons in 49 years, well…that just isn’t conducive to drawing good crowds.  But there was a couple sitting under our window that had a baby.  In fact, they had two children under the age of three.

The baby was not happy.  He must have known the Aggies had lost seven straight.  I got a couple of texts asking why we had a baby in our booth.  That was pretty funny.  Eventually, the baby won and mom and dad left.

NMSU had a nice fireworks display after the game.  We saw it.  Not sure many fans did.

There’s always something to eat postgame.  Everyone on the trip gets food.  Usually it’s Popeyes or KFC.  But Saturday night it was Rudy’s barbecue.  It’s a Texas chain.  And, it’s very very good.

Afterward it was back to El Paso for the flight home.  Outside of a delay because of some paperwork it was a pretty uneventful flight.  But the flight home, plus the time change, plus getting our bags, plus the drive home made it a pretty late night.

I got in bed at 4am.