It’s very rare for there to be an esports event in the Midwest—they’re generally held around Los Angeles and sometimes in Las Vegas, and usually the “weirdest” place you can find a tournament is in Texas or on the East coast. So, when ESPN announced the EXP Invitational – Apex Legends at X Games Minneapolis 2019, Jordan King, a resident of Nebraska, was interested in attending, seeing as it was nearby.

I don’t get to see Jordan too often, so I decided to fly out from Las Vegas to Nebraska and road trip along with him. I arrived two days early (which was when my “hello Omaha” photo was posted), and August 1 was road trip day.

The road trip started relatively uneventfully—we set out at around 9 AM CDT and drove towards Fremont to have breakfast at the Polymath Café and Market. Unfortunately, when we arrived, we found out that they seemed to have gone out of business, as there was a “For Lease” sign in the front window. Instead, we drove around until we found a McDonald’s and had breakfast there instead.

The next leg of our road trip was to Sioux City, Iowa, but it took a bit of time to actually get there. Not only did my phone lose GPS signal twice and I took two wrong turns, but there was also a lot of road construction along the way, and we did a whole lot of stopping.

At one particular construction zone, I had to follow a pilot car to the other side of the single-lane road, which is something that I had never done before. Usually in Las Vegas, a construction worker just flips the Stop sign to Slow and we navigate ourselves, but I guess these guys wanted to be extra safe.

After a quick break in Sioux City, we headed to our next stop in Windom, Minnesota to refuel the truck. When I hopped out, I realized that, while driving through Iowa, I had collected a few cups worth of bug guts and about 20 dead butterflies in my grille. It wasn’t something I was expecting, so it was quite the sight.

Our final stop was in Mankato, Minnesota where we headed to Riverfront Park to take a look at the Minnesota River. Apparently there were invasive species in that area, and the water looked particularly dirty.

After finally making it to Minneapolis, we went to all-you-can-eat sushi at Kyoto Sushi. I picked this particular restaurant out because it had something extremely rare—they offered sashimi on their all-you-can-eat menu. It was probably the best all-you-can-eat sushi experience I ever had—I ended up eating 65 pieces of sashimi, and the fish was actually decently-sized and pretty good quality.

Our first day of X Games is tomorrow; more pictures to come soon.