"Texas 2-step" is the nickname for the days spent flying around Texas. Lots of legs, each fairly short, quick turns. The sort of flying that SWA did back when they got started. A typical day might be starting in HOU at 0700, to AUS, to DAL, to HOU, to CRP, to HOU, to SAT, to LBB. Seven legs, probably just under 7 hours of flying, to the hotel maybe around 1600. Probably no plane changes. Probably in a -200 (though they are going away & you see "Texas 2-step" days in -300's & -500's regularly, and on rare occasion in a -700). Lots of legs through DAL & HOU.
There are some similar "California 2 step" schedules as well. It's a lot of work, but the days generally pay pretty well, and they go pretty quickly. When the weather is nice, it's fun. When the Texas wx is bad, well... you're in it all day!
From CRP to about anywhere on SWA goes thru HOU, iirc. So that is the obvious place you'll want to be based.
All trips start & end at the domicile where the trip originates (you can pick up trips from a base other than your own). One nice thing about being based in HOU, it seems like they get most of the CRP overnights. On those trips, you CAN spend the night at home instead of at the hotel no problem.
Your options as far as trips go would be pretty much as described above: Fly AM's & stay in a hotel/crashpad the night before & get home at the end of your last day, OR fly PM's & commute in the same day you start, & probably spend the night when you finish your last day. Driving... an option, if you want to. Sometimes, you'll luck into a trip that you can commute on both ends. One nice thing about HOU: enough people live in domicile that a good portion of the reserve lines go senior. So, if you do NOT want to sit reserve, you can hold a line with fewer people beneath you at HOU than you could at a commuter base like OAK or MDW.
I'm no fan of commuting to sit reserve, so I did it as little as I could. With a long commute, I always tried to get AM reserve, since the night before the reserve block started I would have to spend at the crashpad anyway, and on the last day I'd have a decent chance of being cut loose in time to make a flight home the same day. If I was commuting a short distance to sit reserve (like CRP to HOU), I think I'd probably use the opposite strategy: bid PM reserve, commute in the morning of (not something you can count on doing with a long commute, but possible from MSY or CRP to HOU), and hope that I get assigned a trip that returns to domicile the last day in time to make the last flight back.
Guys can explain strategies like this & more when you're sitting in the crashpad or hanging out in the pilot lounge, and you can use whatever works best for you.
Hope that helps!
P.S. Slug -- excellent explanation of the workings of the Magic 8 Ball! (The end result still looks an awful lot like smoke & mirrors to me, though!)
