With Arnout 'RR2DO2' Van Meer (our lead coder) and Richard 'Fluffy_gIMp" Jolly (our lead artist) both now living in my home town, meeting up the night before was a no-brainer - certainly a lot easy than the almost military precision that was needed last year to ensure we were all in the same place before starting our collaborative journey.

I don't know - maybe it's just because we were excited, but as we couldn't sleep at all, we focussed on creating a portfolio for Q3F. At QuakeCon last year we had often been asked about Q3F while journeying around the event, but never been able to provide an instant demonstration or even a pictorial overview. No way was that going to happen again this year! This time we were prepared... by 9am Wednesday morning (the time our Taxi was due to take us to the airport) not only did we have 3-4 full-colour folders with Q3F art and feature lists, we also had my laptop completely set-up and configured to show off every aspect of Q3F Beta 2 on demand, albeit at 15 frames-per-second :).

So with our bags packed I kissed my darling wife good-bye. Fluffy, RR2DO2 and I jumped in a Taxi and headed to London-Gatwick Airport for our short hop across the pond to America (woohoo!).

19 hours later we arrived at the Hotel in Mesquite :/

In fact rewind a few hours and I'll explain. A typical flight from London to America (woohoo!) takes around 7-8 hours, except (and this is one BIG except) when you're flying to Dallas. For some reason direct flights to Dallas are like gold dust, and so in our case, not only have we been via Cleveland and Houston, we've now been to Dallas via North Carolina too! I've been in more states than BirdDawg and he's a real 'American'. How cool is that! It is WAY cool, except that we've only been in each state for 1 hour :).

Luckily for us we were spared the nightmare of last year (where we wandered around Dallas airport asking if we were in the right city for Mesquite and did anyone know where Mesquite was anyway?) as Oswald of the Urban Terror team offered to pick us up- what a great guy!

Now we'd met Oswald last year and crowned him "Second nicest guy in the world, after Robert Duffy", so we were more than happy to trust his offer of a lift and waited patiently for him at the gate on arrival. Now of course what we didn't know was that poor old Oswald had already been at Dallas Fort Worth ALL DAY waiting for the other Urban Terror guys.

In fact (unbelievably) he'd been going from gate to gate, trying to track down lost and forlorn members of his team who'd been A.W.O.L. since arrival for eight hours! Eight flippin' hours! Check his diary on the Urban Terror site and you'll find he barely mentions it, testament to the patience and good-heartedness of this guy.

Eventually though everyone was reunited and we got to meet a number of new UT team members: their coder Apoxal and artists SweetNutz, Meaty and Odd (interestingly an artist at Bungie). We also met Dokta8 who we'd met the previous year and what a nice bloke he is too. We also decided that Urban Terror had far wackier aliases than we did :). I mean SweetNutz ffs! Meaty! What are they like!

So after the Urban Terror team had stopped kissing and hugging each other, we headed to Thursdays (a rip-off of Fridays) for some beer and fried cheese. Yes, I really did just say fried cheese :). If you think that's weird, just wait till I tell you about the biscuits and gravy! See in America (woohoo!) they eat this... no wait, I'll come to that later.

We headed out of the airport at around 8:30pm (Dallas time) and jumped into Oswald's sporty Minivan (he'd hired it to pick up girls, but don't tell his girlfriend!) and headed down to Mesquite. Of course with Oswald's luck we were sure to get lost en-route and we did (hehe), but we still arrived at our home for the coming week in rapid time, 10pm Dallas Time in fact (4am GMT) at The Courtyard, Mesquite, Hotel to the stars!

Our hotel, The Courtyard in Mesquite

It's true I tell you! I'm not sure which stars but the minute I find out I'll update q3f.com. What I can confirm though is that The Courtyard is staffed by the fantastic Veronica... Mexican I think (not sure to be honest) but nevertheless helpful and quick to locate our rooms - a blessing when you've travelled for around 19 hours and covered 5,000 miles!

Oh and they had a coffee machine in reception! Fantastic! 24 hour coffee! Even when you've used up all the coffee bags provided in the rooms (including the rooms of your colleagues) you can still get more coffee. I should note that American (woohoo!) coffee is quite weak, and so you generally need to be drinking it non-stop to maintain anything like reasonable levels of caffeine in your blood stream :)

One mistake I'd made during planning was to actually provide our ETA to other team members. Knowing as I do the nature of international travel, it should have been clear to me that providing an ETA was not only unrealistic, but a complete waste of time. Nevertheless I did just that and had told poor BirdDawg that we'd be at the Hotel by 7:30pm :). The result of this of course was that BirdDawg had been waiting for us for over 2 hours! That said, I'm sure it created an excellent (and worthy!) sense of anticipation :).

And if you think that wait was bad, imagine my poor wife! She'd slept exactly one-hour since I'd left, and spent the rest of the time tracking our flight on the ultra-cool American Airlines website - apparently now you can get a GPS bearing on most flights, so she even watched our plane circle the airport while in a landing pattern!

And so after a quick call with Francisca, we heard a rat-a-tat-tat on the door and were united with a pair of our US counterparts; David 'Vorrik' Adams (one of our Audio guys, the most Texan person I know, complete with pickup-truck!) and Jared 'BirdDawg' Hefty, our Lead Level Designer... and don't you dare take the piss out of his funny name! :).

It's the hotel room, well duh!

Also in attendance was Shuriken; BirdDawg's road-trip buddy for their 11-hour cross-state journey and clan leader of the well-known Q3F clan, Braveheart. And what a nice chap he is too! If a little obsessed with Mountain Dew :).

I should note at this point that Vorrik owns (by far) the most outrageous pick-up truck I have ever seen. Imagine if you will, a huge bright blue, pearlescent pickup-truck, complete with Dodge insignia and massive wheels. This was EASILY the best pickup truck I'd ever seen and certainly one I planned on spending a lot of time riding around in during the coming week. On top of that he's armed! What a life! Only in Texas...

And so moving on, as if by telepathy, we all agreed on the next and most obvious task to be undertaken... drink beer at Fridays!!!

Within minutes around 18 of us (all present Q3F and Urban Terror team members) were seated at a banquet-style table, and having hitched up with Brian 'Bobotheseal' Jones (our concept artist and now an employee of Ritual Entertainment, lucky bastard) we started tucking in to food and swigging back the beer - a great end to a VERY long day.

Me proving that even 19 hours of travel wont stop me talking :)

A great end for all except poor RR2DO2 that is, who even after a year away from the States is still too young (by 11 months) to drink beer. Awwwww! Of course he could drink beer and smoke cannabis back in the Netherlands at the age of 16 ffs, so I don't feel THAT sorry for him :)