Tuesday morning, Col’s phone rang early, so we got up and decided to try the breakfast buffet on site in the hotel – as we’d read rave reviews about it online.  It wasn’t that great, not much choice, and what there was to chose from, wasn’t that nice.  I have to say, as Double Tree hotels go, I was disappointed by this one!

Anyways, today, was X-Factor day!

For those of you who don’t read my Facebook or Twitter won’t know that on our printout (it wasn’t a ticket, but a slip to get a ticket – if that makes sense!) stated a long and complicated list of dress-code regulations…including no hats, no shorts, no t-shirts, ABSOLUTELY NO jeans or flip flops, no white, no logos…so we were originally starting on the wrong foot.

The ticket said, ‘dress as you would going to a nightclub or out for a nice dinner’…uhm, well Col and I aren’t club-goers and, in fact, I barely own ‘nice dinner’ clothes, so Col donned a shirt and I threw on something casual (and non-logo’ed!) in the hopes that the state of our britches wouldn’t *really* have an effect on whether we got in or not.

We left the hotel around 11.30am, with doors due to open at 12pm, but we didn’t get in from the sunshine until 12.30pm or so – ouch!

Standing out in the heat was pretty tough, even though it was ‘only’ in the 80’s.

Once inside, we had to wait yet again, in huge queues to get in to get seats, they were general admission tickets, so you got in a line and queued there til they opened the doors.

Finally we sat down, and, since it was already past 1pm we’d guessed that the 1pm start that was advertised, wasn’t going to happen.  What we didn’t expect to happen, was this X-factor audience thing that our crowd-rouser Tom, decided to do.  He went around the audience letting random people in the audience sing to win a can of Pepsi (yes, that was really what the prize was), this went on for AGES, as there was some kind of ‘technical issue’ that prevented us from not only starting on time, but, seemingly starting at all.

Around 4pm, the judges finally made an appearance and we got the show on the road.  The audition process itself it a little longer than it looks on TV.  There’s more Q and A between judge and contestant, and Simon – as mean as he appears on TV, is genuinely rooting for the contestants and often gave a second chance in places that I definitely thought, as being, somewhat over generous!

As it happened, from what we saw of the auditions (around 10-15 people), Dallas did NOT in fact have the X-Factor, neither did Kansas, nor did Oklahoma…turns out that it was Houston that had the X-Factor, as the only people to go through to the next round, were, in fact, up from Houston, like we were.  There were a couple of pretty good artists that auditioned, no one really, who blew me out of the water, but we were barely getting started, when Simon called the auditions to a close.  I think he realised that the audience for the second show was queuing outside (It was due to start at 6pm).

When it was over, we weren’t even allowed to pee (they’d cordened off the corridor to the toilets!!) and, once outside, we contemplated going back in for the afternoon session of the auditions – cause we felt short changed by the session, due to the 3-4 hours of filming auditions, being cut to just over an hour.

Col went to pick up our tickets, only to discover that the afternoon session was about 4 times busier than the morning session had been.  I guess people got out of work and went straight to the American Airlines center, meaning that the queue for the tickets was HUGE, the queue once you HAD tickets was HUGE and there was only 4,500 seats available.  The morning session almost filled the available seats – joining the queue with 4 times that number? No thanks!

Instead, and instead of waiting an hour for the hotel shuttle to come and pick us up, we managed to hail down a cab back to the hotel.  Our taxi driver was a new father, he’d had his first child less than a fortnight prior, Daniel James Rodgers, born June 1st to a very proud father.  He was a fun taxi man, we chatted a lot about where he was from (Compton, LA) and about where we were from and compared violence and horror stories! LOL!

Back at the hotel, we picked up the car and headed out to Gios New York Deli for our tea (yes, another place we had a voucher for!) I posted a review on Yelp for this place, it has the potential to be a really cool place to eat, however, there were just so many wee things wrong that it frustrated us!

Firstly, we walked in and there’s no indication whether you wait to be seated, or pick your own seat. So, we ended up hovering…how awkward right? I hate that, either have someone take me to my seat, or, have a sign that says ‘sit yourselves’ – that’s not a hard one to fix!

When we sat down, we were brought a basket type thing, it had pickles, crunchy bagel slices and some brioche-type bread.

No dips, no instructions on what to do with the odd-combo of food in front of you, just dry bread(s) and pickles..bizarre! A nice hummus or something would have gone well with it, but dry, it was just weird!

I guess weird was the theme for the dinner, the service was slow, the waitress forgot my ‘side’, my steak was medium rare instead of well done, the salads were bland and plain and when I sent my steak back to get re-fired, it arrived back on an empty plate – they’d tossed the rest of my friggin food!!

Hubby’s food was alright, nothing hugely special, though I imagine a whole box of pasta went into it’s making. As we say back home in Northern Ireland, it was ‘quere packing’, meaning it was a huge meal that was very filling.

Back at the hotel, we watched O’Reilly, Family Guy and bits and pieces of Piers Morgan – a huge storm hit Dallas interrupting our cable service – which was disappointing as he was interviewing Le Toya Jackson on her new book and single, ‘Starting Over’ and we were keen to watch it!