If you go to a national (yes, I know that it should be called a “continental”) tournament, you should play in national events. In the Fall NABC's there were two events that seemed attractive to me – the Super Senior Pairs and the 0-6,000 Mini-Blue Ribbon Pairs. During the summer I asked Felix Springer, one of my regular partners, to play with me. He agreed.

I arranged to fly to San Francisco on the Friday after Thanksgiving, when the fares were low. I arranged to stay at one of the tournament hotels, the Westin, which I later discovered was actually a little less than a half mile walk from the Marriott, the site of all of the bridge sessions.

My flight was scheduled to land at SFO at 6:59 PM. On Wednesday, two days before departure, I received from the hotel manager an email that warned me that because of Macy's ceremonial lighting of a Christmas tree in Union Square, the streets around the hotel would be closed from 5-8 PM on Friday. So, I planned to eat something in the airport and then take BART to the hotel.

My flight Friday departed at 1:15. That morning I fixed myself a pot of Shop-Rite Chicken Noodle soup. Sue prepared me a sandwich for lunch and then drove me to the airport. I enjoyed the latter at Bradley along with a Diet Coke from McDonald's that cost over $3.

My flights were both quite full. An earlier flight from Hartford to Chicago had been canceled. So, all of those middle seats that had appeared empty when I checked in were full of grumbling passengers. Next to me was a mother with the world's best-behaved baby.

I had scarcely taken my seat on that flight when I realized that I had forgotten my U-shaped neck pillow. I could probably purchase one in O'Hare, but it would pain me greatly to shell out cash for something I could visualize sitting on the floor of my closet.

In my backpack were three books, a magazine, and my convertible computer with me. Imagine my chagrin when I discovered that the overhead light on the flight from Chicago to Denver malfunctioned. I had to sit in the dark for five hours. College football games were on the screen in front of me. So, at least I got to watch most of a fairly interesting game between Memphis and Cincinnati and the beginning of Central Florida's rout of South Florida. CFU's quarterback Dillon Gabriel is the real deal.

Because of extreme and prolonged turbulence the seatbelt light was on for several hours after we took off from Chicago. So, there was no service during that period. I spent much of my time in my rigid chair in the darkness reflecting on the long period in which I traveled by air several times a month. Most of my horror stories involved United Airlines. I don't think that I will patronize the company again.

Before I got my luggage at SFO I purchased a “Castro” sandwich at Klein's Deli. I retrieved my bag without an issue and found a fairly comfortable place to consume my supper. The bread was much too thick and crusty for my taste. Although my mouth is so large that in my youth I was undefeated at dunking for apples, I had great difficulty eating this sandwich. Moreover, the bread overwhelmed the taste of the “roast beef, roast turkey, cheddar, lettuce, tomato, pickle, and Klein’s special sauce.” It was a big disappointment.

My arthritic legs undertook the long trek to the airport's BART station. There I used a credit card to buy a ticket for $10.90 from one of the machines. The train had ten cars; two would have sufficed. I sat near a rather scruffy-looking guy who was already on the train when it arrived. This was peculiar, since the airport was the end of the line.

The man had a baby stroller with about ten plastic bags tied to it. At the second stop he got to his feet but then sat down again. At the third stop he arose again and slowly pushed the stroller toward the open door. The stroller was halfway through when the doors snapped shut on it. He tried to push it through to no avail. I did not know how to help him, but a more experienced rider walked over to the door and hit the door's rubber edging hard enough that it sprung back and allowed him to effect his exit.

The train's intercom system was scratchy. The driver announced each stop, but I had difficulty understanding her. Fortunately there were signs as we approached every station, and they were easy enough to read. I exited the train at Powell. By chance I surfaced at the exit very near to Powell St., the spot at which the cable cars turn around. Since the hotel was right on Powell, I had no trouble locating it.

The short walk up to the hotel was rather startling. The streets were filled with party-goers, and music was blaring from all sides. The gigantic tree in Union Square dominated the view from the hotel's main entrance.

The hotel's elevator was unique. You select your floor before you get on and then use swipe your door key on a pad below the number pad. It displays which elevator is coming and which floors it will stop at. There are no buttons inside the elevator cars at all.

Room #473 was surprisingly small. Its dominant feature was a huge television screen that filled much of one wall less than a yard from the foot of the double bed. The doors to the bathroom and closet were adjacent to one another and identical in appearance. One could imagine a sleepy or drunk resident selecting the wrong one. Perhaps that explains the fact that whenever the door to the closet was opened the light came on.

The lobby of the Westin gave evidence of a fairly ritzy establishment, but the shower in my room was something from a previous century. The head was square and about eight feet off the ground. It reminded me of showers in the safari camps in Africa. The handle was pointed down. I turned it counter-clockwise. I found a setting where the temperature was only a little too cold. Subsequently I had no trouble after I realized that I should have turned the handle clockwise.

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When I willed myself out of bed at 8:00 on Saturday morning I discovered that the room had a Mr. Coffee machine, Starbucks cardboard cups, and Peet's coffee.

I started up Yoga, my convertible computer to check my email. I then realized that I had neglected to bring my wireless mouse. Maintaining my email without it would be a pain.

Felix was scheduled to fly in on Saturday morning. He hoped that we could warm up by playing in the 1:00 and 7:30 games. I walked to McDonald's for my usual breakfast sandwich and a large Diet Coke. San Francisco imposes a surcharge on all carbonated beverages and sweet tea. I don't get it. Diet Coke has zero calories, the same as unsweetened tea. It was still a tremendous bargain compared to every other restaurant that I patronized in SF.

Ms. Google's walking directions to the Marriott were not the best. Fortunately I was in no hurry, and the circuitous route prescribed allowed me to discover the restaurants that were located in a courtyard behind the hotel. It was raining very lightly, as it did on every day all week. I never really got wet, and I never felt the need to take the poncho out of my backpack.

I found the tournament's registration desk. I filled out the card and received the restaurant booklet and a charging pad for my phone. That's it; no bag; no sticker.

The playing area for the afternoon-evening sessions was two floors below the lobby. Escalators led to these floors. As I made the descent my ACBL Goodwill Committee pin fell off and landed pin-side down. The fact that I had my backpack on at the time rendered it difficult to retrieve the pin. I hurriedly got down on my hands and knees to pry the pin from the rapidly moving step. I did manage to get it, but I must have looked like I had suffered an accident. Another player asked me if I needed help.

I never found the little thing that is supposed to hold the pin on.

I sent a text to Felix explaining where the games were. Later he called me to confirm that he had arrived and would make it to the game. I purchased $300 worth of Bridge Bucks.

Felix and I played in the B/C Pairs. Our first session was very strange. I played terribly; I even missed a fourth-suit forcing bid that Felix had made. However, our opponents played even worse, and we scored a 61% game.

Afterwards we ate supper at Mel's Drive-in, which was about a block from the Marriott. I ordered the fried chicken, which was not bad at all, and, believe me, I have high standards.

Felix, who had been up for twenty-four hours, went back to his room at the Westin to shave and shower. I stayed back at the Marriott and read one of my books.

I played better in the evening, but so did our opponents. We badly messed up the defense on one hand. That dropped us to 55%. We finished fifth overall, which was not too bad.

There was one very unusual hand. Felix had bid 2♣. The player on my right bid 2♥. We play that after interference over 2♣, double shows a bust. I had one, and so I played the little red card. My left-hand opponent asked Felix what my double indicated. He said that we had no specific agreement, and so it probably just showed “cards.” I was puzzled by that explanation until I noticed that LHO already had a 1♦ card laying atop two score sheets in front of him. Felix had not opened 2♣; he had overcalled that 1♦ bid.

I deliberately did not learn the score of the college football games until the bridge was over. It was not a surprise that the Wolverines lost to OSU again. Oh, well, another season down the drain.

Felix and I walked back to the Westin together. I went to sleep immediately. My legs, which were not used to the hills, cramped up many times during the night. I did not sleep well at all.

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I settled for a fruit cup for breakfast on Sunday. Eating often makes me sleepy, and I wanted to be alert for the morning session of the Super Senior Pairs. Felix attended Audrey Grant's presentation for new players, and he was very impressed.

We got off to a horrendous start in the first session, but we later made two doubled contracts. Past experience indicated that making doubled contracts was a very good predictor of a good score in matchpoints. However, we scored only 43 percent, which meant that it would be extremely difficult to produce a second session that was good enough to qualify.

We were a little despondent while we ate lunch at Mel's. Nevertheless, I really enjoyed the Reuben sandwich. They brought me two cole slaws instead of mixed vegetables. They eventually got it right, but only just before we were preparing to leave.

The afternoon session seemed worse than the morning, but we brought our score up to 48.6 percent. We played against Ellie Hanlon and Mary Savko, whom I often see at tournaments. The ladies easily made it to the second day, but we did not. This was a pretty big disappointment. Because for some stupid reason the ACBL has decided to raise the eligibility age to 75, I will not get to play in this tournament again for three years.

Felix and I once again relied on Ms. Google to help us find Johnny Foley's Irish Pub. After a few wrong turns we arrived. It seemed to me more San Francisco than Ireland. I had the chicken pot pie and a Guinness. Both were tasty, but the pot pie contained some unfamiliar seasonings. I consider chicken pot pie as the ultimate comfort food, and I don't like it when the cook fools around with it.

The walk from the restaurant to the hotel was short. I fell asleep without checking my email or texts. I expected more cramps, but I had no problem sleeping.

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Monday was a very bad day. When I checked my email and texts, I discovered rather frantic messages from Sue about the IHG Mastercard. Evidently an illegal scanner had been attached to the machine that sold BART tickets, and I had mistakenly used it on Friday. Someone had been trying to use the card number in California, but all of the charges had been rejected by the bank. Sue had told them to cancel the card. She wanted to make sure that I still had the physical card and warned me not to use it. Since I had no plans to do so, it was not a big deal to me.

Sue also told me that all of New England was expecting a big snowstorm.

We decided to play in the Daylight B/C pairs, an event that we expected to do well in. In the morning session we scored 58 percent, and we thought that we had done even better than that.

We ate at Mel's again. They serve breakfast late, which appealed to Felix. I wanted to try the French Dip sandwich. It was pretty good, but the Reuben had been better.

I took a few photos both in the morning and at lunch time.

The afternoon session on Monday was a shock to me. I thought that we had played well, at least as well as in the morning. We had bid and made the only slam that was available. We had made no errors in playing any of our contracts. Nevertheless we scored only 43 percent, much lower than I expected. We did not even make the overalls.

I do not generally obsess over results, but this time I examined our scores very carefully. On nine hands our score was below 40 percent. Three of the nine were par or better scores. On two of those three I had made sketchy preempts that had evidently pushed our opponents into makeable contracts. Twice we underbid. Three times we took reasonable lines of defense that did not work. The last one was just a fix because one opponent grotesquely underbid her hand.

I was depressed. If we scored like this against B/C opponents, it seemed likely that we would do poorly in the 0-6,000 Mini-Blue Ribbon Pairs that started on Tuesday.

Our playing schedule caused me to miss the Goodwill Committee meeting on Monday morning. There was also a Goodwill reception in the late afternoon. I showed up near the end of it. I recognized none of the few people who were still there, and so I left immediately.

Felix wanted to play in the evening game. I went out walking in hopes of finding the KFC that Ms. Google insisted was only 19 minutes from the Marriott (and much less from the Westin). I never found it. I ended up buying a sandwich and some chips from a convenience store. I ate them in the hotel room.

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The Mini Blue Ribbon Pairs on Tuesday would be at 1:00 and 7:30. I texted Felix with the recommendation of having brunch at Sears Fine Foods, just a block from the Westin, at 10;00. He agreed. To my surprise Felix had gone on a ten-mile hike before breakfast. Just hearing about his feat made me want to take a nap.

I ordered a ham and cheese omelet. The breakfast was good, but not exceptional. Like everything else in this town, it was expensive.

Our morning round was a disappointing 48 percent. Two hands caused us unexpected bidding difficulties. Hand #15 contains a biddable slam for East-West. If West opened 2♠, as I did, East must bid 3♥, which we play as forcing. West might feel awkward about bidding the eight-count at the four level, but in this case 4♦ was the best bid. East can then ask for key cards and delight at the news of a key card and a useful void. He can't count twelve tricks, but he will be forced to bid 6♦.

Felix, however, used Ogust rather than bidding hearts. I followed the rules and showed a good hand with a bad suit. We ended up in 3NT, down 3. Felix thought that I should have shown a bad hand because he expected an outside entry. To my way of thinking (at the time) we just did not have the right tools. Felix used the word “judgment,” which is anathema to my approach to bridge.

Suppose that we played both Ogust and Feature. We could still use 2NT for shapely hands where Ogust works well and 3♣ to ask for a feature when looking for 3NT. If Felix bid 3♣, I could deny a feature by bidding 3♠. He could sign off in 4♠, our second-best contract. I really like this idea, which I hereby present to the world as “Two-Way-vada Ogust.”

The other controversial hand was #9. This debacle was clearly my fault. Felix opened 1♦, and South doubled. I should have just bid 1♥. For some reason I thought that I only had three hearts. We played that Inverted Minors was off against all interference. My seven-point hand was two weak for a redouble, but adding in the singleton it was strong enough for a limit raise. Since Inverted was off, I bid 3♦. Felix explained that it was weak and passed.

I don't know if my analysis (apart from not being able to count my hearts) was right, but we easily fixed the misunderstanding by adding Jordan for minors to handle the limit raise.

Our score of 48 percent was only slightly disappointing. We knew that we could do better if we could stay alert in the evening.

We ate supper at Wang with our friends Bob Sagor and Judy Hyde. I had wonton soup and spare ribs. It was a mistake. I began to get sleepy almost immediately.

I really tried very hard to maintain my concentration in the evening, but my brain got cloudier and cloudier. I finally had to run to the Mission Market two flights up to buy a $4 cup of coffee. When we finished the round, the Bridgemate said that we had a 54 percent game. If that had been correct, we would have qualified for the second day, but by the time that the actual result was posted it was below 52 percent. We were out.

I was disappointed but not crestfallen. Bob and Judy did not make it either. We arranged to play with them in the bracketed B Swiss on Wednesday scheduled at 10 and 3.

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I pushed my lazy ass out of bed fairly early on Wednesday and did my leg exercises. I then walked to McDonald's and bought the usual sausage biscuit with egg. I also got a large Diet Coke. This McDonald's was unique in that it had a doorman. I assume that he was not on the payroll because he held a McDonald's cup in which he solicited tips.

I found a spot on one of the high tables that were located on the first basement level of the Marriott to eat my sandwich, read the Daily Bulletin and updated the notes for this piece.

Felix had trouble finding the event because registration was inside the room, not in the hallway. Eventually we bought our entry and, as expected, we were in the top bracket. There were 75 teams in the event. The top nine brackets had seven teams, and the tenth bracket had twelve. So, we played only six rounds, and there were three-ways. In every other such event in which I have played, they would have had eight brackets of eight teams and one of eleven. I have no idea why they chose such a complicated format. Maybe a bracket of eleven would not be manageable.

We did pretty well. We won every match except one, and that loss (by one point) was due to the fact that I temporarily forgot that we were playing lebensohl after a double of a weak two bid. We came up two points short of winning the event even though we had defeated by thirteen points the team that finished first. On the last hand that we played, our opponents aggressively bid a successful game while Bob and Judy stopped short. Still, we all had a good time, and it was much less stressful, at least for me, than all those pairs games.

Bob and Felix wanted to play in the evening game. Before I left for supper I arranged to play with Felix in the B/C pairs on Thursday at 10 and 3. I wandered over to the food court near Target. I tried the specialty from a place called Siam Chicken. Maybe I ate it wrong, but I did not enjoy it much. I went back to the hotel room and ate some of the potato chips from the convenience store. I also dealt with my email.

Thursday night was awful. I was up performing the cramp dance again over and over. I had worn a different pair of shoes on Wednesday. Maybe they were to blame.

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On Thursday morning I got a nice text from Sue. She said that after the game in Simsbury, she went up to Ken Leopold, the director and my usual partner there, and complained that she and her partner Fred Gagnon were not on the results list. Ken laughed uncontrollably. Sue looked again and still could not find them. Ken finally had to direct her attention to the top of the list. She and Fred had finished first out of ten teams. I sent her a congratulatory text.

I saw Felix eating some fruit by himself at the Mission Street Pantry. I tried to sit with him, but the constant opening and closing of the nearby door proved much too drafty for me. I again took my breakfast down to the counters near the playing area.

Before the first hand Felix told me that he planned to use Uber to get to the airport on Friday. I could join him, but he would be leaving at 4:30. This would get me to the airport long before my own flight, but, after thinking about it, I decided to take him up on his offer. I would be at least as comfortable in the airport as in my hotel room, and I would not need to deal with BART during the rush hour.

The first session got off to a chaotic start. We had no opponents. Eventually a director found a pair of ladies to plug in at our table. We got the first round in, but we were a little late arriving at the second table, and the player sitting North annoyed me by alternating between calling for the director and telling everyone to keep playing. I thought that we had a good session after that, and I was a little disappointed by the 55 percent result.

We ate our final lunch at Mel's. I ordered the Reuben again, and this time they brought the mixed vegetables.

Felix admitted to getting tired in the afternoon session, but I noticed no deterioration in his play. I got confused by some very strange bidding by an opponent and missed an overtrick on a late hand. We ended up a little over 60 percent, which put us fifth overall. I thought that we played our best bridge on the last day.

Felix and I ate supper at DelaRosa. We were the oldest diners by at least three or four decades. We had to wait for more than forty minutes, and the noise when we were finally seated was oppressive. A cute waitress welcomed us and took our orders, but her voice seemed to blend with the din. I could not understand her at all. It made me feel really old.

Felix and I ordered the same thing – Chicken Parmigiana and a glass of Barbera. The food was good, but as always seemed the case on this trip, the taste was not what I expected.

When Bob and Felix played in the evening game, they had won a bottle of wine for finishing first in their section. Felix somehow wangled an extra bottle, which he offered to me. I accepted it on behalf of Sue, who actually won the only event she played in while I was in San Francisco.

Back at the hotel I received a text from Sue that her broken toe was healing well enough that she did not need to have it taped to the other toe any more, and she could stop wearing the half boot. She was very happy about this. I packed, figured out how to set the alarm on my phone to 3:30AM, and went to sleep.

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I woke up at 3:15. If I have a super power, it is the ability to avoid oversleeping. I fixed a cup of coffee, shaved, finished packing, and then met Felix in the lobby.

Our Uber driver, Claudio, was from Sao Paulo, Brazil. He let both of us off at the Southwest ticketing counters, the very first ones in the A terminal. From there I made my very long trek to the United area, which was at the far end of the C terminal. I killed a few hours there doing Sudokus and reading The Immaculate Deception by Iain Pears.

Eventually I checked in and went through security. I bought lunch at Super Duper Burger. I was pleasantly surprised at how good the sandwich was.

I also bought a souvenir neck pillow. It helped me sleep through most of the flight to Denver. I arrived there at 4:00PM. I expected the lines at the food court to be minimal, but I was wrong. I ended up eating another hamburger for supper at Smash Burger. I was singularly unimpressed with it.

The plane arrived in Hartford early. There was still quite a bit of snow on the ground. I texted Sue, and she and her young friend Tyesha picked me up. I gave the pillow to Sue as a present from San Francisco.