Don't Mess with Texas

Washington, D.C., USA

As I put the finishing touches on my preparations for the trip, I'd like to address a question that many have posed to me in recent weeks: how in the world did this excursion to Eastern Europe get dreamed up?

It all goes back to the 2002 Olympics in Salt Lake City. My roommate at UT, Damon, had worked at the '02 Games and throughout our time in Austin, he relayed many stories about his days in Utah. In sum, he had one of the best times of his life and I was quickly convinced that working at the Olympics was something that I wanted to do at some point in my life.

My graduation from UT in May 2004 and my upcoming departure to Cambridge in October 2004 left me with quite a long summer to fill my time. Knowing the summer Olympics were going to be in Athens, I decided back in the fall of 2003 to try and score a job in Greece. After a (very) little contemplation, I thought that I had the master plan: I would work for the famed USA basketball team: the "Dream Team." I went to the team Web site and browsed around looking for any type of leads regarding employment opportunities. I found none, but using my uncanny resourcefulness I ran across a page of the Dream Team executive board. I was in luck: one of the executives was from Texas. Don't mess with Texas, I thought to myself.

I called up the exec, explaining to his secretary that "It was Andy from Texas." Surely -- I thought -- any Texan would want to talk to another Texan. Fortunately, I was right and the secretary buzzed me through. Yet my Olypmic dreams quickly came crashing down. The bad news? The Dream Team hires their Olympic crew directly from the NBA. But the gentleman from Texas quickly bounced back the surprising good news: a "contact."

And so came my "in" into the US Olympic network. One contact led to another and before I knew it, my resume was in the hands of the US Olympic Committee PR director. Through a little paperwork, I all of the sudden had a gig working at a peasant's wages (actually a small stipend) for the USOC.

And thus the seed was planted for a little jaunt over to Athens in August. But try as I might, I could not manage to secure housing for the month for less than 8000 euros. (Yes, you did in fact read that correctly.) Wow, that's quite a sum and so I weighed my different options.

In the end, I decided to take the money that I would have spent doing the Olympics for three entire weeks and morphed the trip into an all-around Eastern European adventure. Luckily, I'll still be able to go to Athens. And even more lucky, the USOC is still going to let me work for as long as I can be there.

And my luck hasn't run out. I've got some good friends that have hopped on board for some of the fun. Damon will be with me on the first three-week leg of the journey (Prague to Vienna) and then Sarah will join for another two and a half weeks. Adam has finally committed and will be coming over for about ten days at some point in the exploration. There are a few others that are waivering (the recently married Cliff Kornegay and ping pong champ Brian Kelsey), so hopefully we can get them to come on down too. All are friends from UT so you can be sure that wherever we go, we'll be sharing the pride that got us all here in the first place. Don't Mess with Texas.