The Travelogue

Bowling Green

At 2:45 p.m. Central Time on Tuesday, the message came in, with a time stamp that indicated it had been left an hour earlier.

"The plane leaves around 3 p.m.," the sports information director said. "We'll see you down there at the airport."

I'd have received the call on time if I'd been anywhere else. Bowling Green, Kentucky is one of the few places in America where my phone doesn't work correctly, a time-warping non-Verizon vortex where every call is a roamer and new voicemails don't show up on the readout.

But there I was on the campus of Western Kentucky University, in the direct shadow of the roundhouse called E.A. Diddle Arena. Two days earlier, the Hilltoppers had clinched a spot in the Sweet 16 with a win over San Diego; hundreds and hundreds of fans had greeted them on Sunday night at the Bowling Green/Warren County Regional Airport. I was in town to cover the sendoff to the West Regional in Phoenix, which was rumored to be an even bigger deal.

Birmingham

This month has its place in the weather calendar, a rock-solid role. March thaw helps keep April showers warm, and as long as everything happens in the right order, May flowers won't be DOA. March basketball, however, is as unpredictable as global warming. You don't know who's going to win, where the path will lead, or how long it will last before you get sent home.

I left Rhode Island on March 13, the middle of Championship Fortnight, and haven't been back since. I didn't rent a car, since nobody could have guessed how long I'd be out for, or where I'd be going. So I drove the family sedan down to Atlantic City that Wednesday morning, just in time for a noon tip, and spent four days at the Atlantic 14 tournament. I had a routine, parking in the Caesar's lot by day, and disappearing out of town when the action was over.

On Selection Sunday, I packed up and headed west towards Dayton for my annual trip to the Play-In Game. That annual evening of 65 fates, I sat in a Bread Restaurant in Western Pennsylvania, the bracket matchups dribbling into my web browser in plain text, in silence. Without waiting for the full bracket, I excitedly fired off an e-mail.

Birmingham. That was the hot one. I could feel it.

Edible State

I read somewhere once that nine out of ten new restaurants fail, that the crowded market and the high first-year costs conspire to ruin nearly all new ventures.

This statistic, most assuredly, does not apply to Texas.

On a warm late January night, wearing shirtsleeves, I cruised through the northwest Houston suburbs in a powder blue Kia Rio, modern country music on the two-speaker radio, manual windows rolled all the way down. Reflected in the windshield as I leaned forward, endless neon lights that would rival even the Las Vegas Strip. But these signs were advertising strip steaks, chicken strips, batter-fried fish sticks.

Chains of Love

The Donner Party, those westbound settlers who were looking for gold to pan and ended up as each other's dinner, was a contingent cut in half by the towering gateway that separates two areas that came to be Nevada and California. Donner Pass is named for the group that was 87 strong on the east side of the mountains in the summer of 1846, and only 48 when survivors emerged the next spring. A 7,840-foot mountain can be cruel like that.

One hundred and sixty-one winters later, a college basketball reporter zoomed up that oversized hill, ears popping to the rhythm of a rock and roll song on the radio. He -- I mean I -- had rented a gold-colored Kia Rio at San Jose International Airport earlier that day, and after a three-hour stop at a UC-Davis game, took to the mountains. Late one clear and cold Thursday night in January of 2008, I pulled over at a mountainside rest area, kept the engine running for heat, and dreamed high country dreams.

Versus Local

On the road, general well-being is a complicated mesh of karmic gears, all of which must be humming and whirring smoothly to ensure smooth runnings. For example, there's cop karma, rental car karma, WiFi karma, digestive karma and gas prices karma. Those are only a few.

For two weeks, I was having a hell of a time with my Waffle House karma. It seemed like every time I stepped into the World's Leading Server, that yellow hut with the globe lighting, I was suddenly an undesirable unserviceable, despite the "house rules" that said they didn't discriminate against creed, color or tip size. It was almost as if they'd circulated my picture with the caption, "treat this guy like crap."

For instance, there was the location near Kansas City where I stopped for breakfast on January 2nd. I was the only customer there, and I took my regular seat at the counter. One employee organized silverware in the rack right in front of me, never stopping to acknowledge my presence. The line cook cleaned off the batter drippings from the station of four waffle irons, and the waitress in the corner took a cell-phone call.

Several minutes passed, and I couldn't stay polite anymore. "Am I going to get service here?"

Fool

People always seem so disappointed when the story isn't as simple as they apparently thought it was. In the eyes of some folks, I don't stand up to certain ideas of pure and perfect vagrancy.

"You never stay in hotels? You just sleep in the car?"

Actually, I stay in hotels on days off between games. There usually isn't anything going on hoops-wise on Fridays, unless I'm somewhere in the northeast. That's when I catch up on phone interviews, site programming, and answering e-mails. Those are all things that are easier to accomplish with a heavy door between oneself and the public, instead of at a Flying J where truck drivers are always coming up and asking how that Apple laptop is "working out."

"You're the guy who drives all over the country to games, like a college basketball rip-off of John Madden? Are you afraid of flying too?"

This One's For The Valley

This one's for the Valley, the Missouri Valley. This is a tribute to that switch of strong and landlocked America that only sees the sun an hour after the right coast does, whether Indiana saves daylight or not. Let the light shine from Lincoln's boyhood home to his license-plate Land, across Iowa and the region's namesake Show-Me state, into the brilliant corners of Nebraska and Kansas. This one's for the very center of the Central time zone.

This one's for Republican voters, for corn-miles, for playing in Peoria. This is also for the Kum & Go, a chain of gas stations so blissfully unaware of itself. It's a special shout-out to the "Burgers & Cream" in Carbondale, Illinois, and to the 50-year-old old-time Steak & Shake in Springfield, Missouri, the one with the sign on the side that says, "We Protect Your Health." To the Buffalo Wild Wings locations from end to end, and to "Ski," the lemony-orangey hometown beverage of Evansville, Indiana.

This is for the diners, for the buffets, for size 42 pants. This is for skinny white kids in black t-shirts in the parking lot of the Jo-Ann Fabrics store at 10 p.m., clouds of cigarette smoke hanging overhead like bored ghosts, all gathered around a pair of beaten and bruised Japanese automobiles from the early Nineties. There's an Evanescence CD playing loudly over a severely taxed and tinny-sounding speaker system. It's the major-label debut, the one with all the hits on it.

This is for the slow turn of the key, for the sputtering rev of the engine, for the eternal marriage of machinery and freedom. This is for backseat sex, for endless squirming and stray elbows and not quite getting the angle right, for dejection and disappointment. This is for swearing that one day... One day we're going to get out of here, Maureen, and we're never going to look back.

This is for never leaving. Ever.

Comfort, Enemy of Progress

When folks find out I sleep in truck stops and live out of my suitcase during college basketball season, I can't blame them if they're not impressed. If my life was a Richard Dawson survey-says, the number one reaction would be horror, followed closely on points by the kind of sympathy that prompts people to offer five bucks, you know, "for something to eat." That's fine, I'm not offended, but keep the cash.

When folks find out about the elaborate survival system I've developed over three-plus years on the hoop highway -- either by direct conversation, hearsay, or this website -- they're usually a little bit impressed, at least enough to wonder what kind of a moron I am. Some are even curious about the origins of the system, how I came up with this particular brand of madness. Here goes.

Beatrice and Sandy

Ever since faces launched ships, men have been giving inanimate objects women's names. Who knows why, really. It might be a subconcious effort to tap into the whole earth-mother provider thing, or it might just be an excuse to think about sex more often. Whatever the reason, it's something deeply ingrained.

In modern Western times, we have even more opportunities to do so. We may not have ships or bomber planes, but a high percentage of American males have given at least one of their automobiles a female name (I've tended to name mine in honor of Playboy Playmates from my college days). And then there are all these new electronic items, many of which ask to be named right out of the box.

Food

Ask any assistant coach in college basketball, they'll tell you that one of the toughest challenges with away games is food. Carefully prepared team meals are usually the rule at home, but the road is an endless and glowing ribbon of McDonald's, Burger King, convenience stores and casual dining. Chain restaurants might align themselves with sports by way of official sponsorships and such, but the reality is that what they sell makes you fat.

Same goes for travelling journalists, too. I have my own offseason workouts -- eight-mile runs in the park back in Pawtucket, two-a-day hourlong stationary bike sessions of 17 miles each, all with the goal of maintaining some level of fitness during the five-month grind. By late November, though, I find myself sweating and short of breath on long flights of stairs, and the one-two punch of Thanksgiving and Christmas makes my shirts and pants start getting uncomfortably tight by the time the calendar turns. With all the sitting around in chairs and car seats that covering athletics requires, I get my Freshman 15 once a year, every year.

North Carolina

When I'm covering a game, I always dress in a crisp shirt and a solid-color tie, usually a coat as well... just like the coaches do. It's important to look nice. (That's something I picked up from Andy Katz.)

Those coaches, and sometimes other media members, will occasionally engage me in conversation about how far away from home I am. Sometimes they'll ask, "Where are you staying?"

In the past, I'd always reply with "Comfort Inn," which of course is a synonym for "rental car." I don't like lying or intentional misdirection when it's not explicitly required, so I've changed that. Now I say, "oh, you know, around," or "I'm not staying... I'm goin'."

Philadelphia

Lift up your downcast eyes, woman; there is a special place in heaven for you. O truck stop waitress, you sustainer of the long-distance voyageur, Cinderella of the service industry, underfoot guardian and caretaker of the linoleum empire... one day, when you finally fall from your weary stanchions, you will cast off your worn features and wrinkled skin, exchange your pleated polyester skirt for pillowy garments with thread counts in the millions.

This is not a place of cold revenge, mind you -- your ungrateful, grumbling low tippers and your minimum-wage tormentors will be far away, banished to that lower, hotter place. Yes, one day, you will leave behind your nametag and your happy-face flair and your aching joints for your final reward, a beautiful eternity of hourly foot massages and cloud-soft pillows upon which to rest your weary soul.

The Long One

Steel-colored first light above a lengthwise highway, rolling gun-metal hills beyond, a scene set off by a row of spindly and barren trees in crisp black focus. There's something comforting, regular about the standard tableau that I usually wake up to on the road, a simple chalk drawing dashed off by an art student. It could be anywhere in America, but it is one place: the far corner of the truck stop parking lot.

This reverie, or contentment, or whatever you could call it, quickly fades away -- early-morning consciousness gets sharpened against the tall black gas-price digits on the flickering yellow sign. I've known this was coming for several days now, and this is not something I can put it off until tomorrow or the next day. This is what I've slept six grey hours for.

This is the Long One.

Tennessee

Morning cracks open over Middle Tennessee like a giant farm-fresh egg. It bastes the mini-mall in gooey yellow sunshine, washing over the giant fluorescent Shoe Carnival sign. The letters blink a few times, then they're drowned, extinguished for another day.

The sun soaks the Bread Restaurant, bleeding through the tall windows, and my laptop casts a long sundial shadow that reads 7 a.m.. This is where I sit now, and where I will sit for the next eight hours. This is my temporary office on this first Friday of the traveling season, where I'll catch up on writing and coding and e-mail.

Kentucky

It goes in two directions, separated by painted lines or, in the case of American interstate highways, steel and shrubbery. The two directions are named "coming" and "going," two fluid concepts that depend a lot on which side of the road you happen to be on.

Another key travel duality is order and chaos. Every traveller faces both when away from home. The chaos isn't necessarily a negative thing -- chaos is the surprise of a new discovery, the sweet shock of an unfamiliar experience that will be remembered far longer than ten thousand carbon-copy workdays. "Chaos" is just another name for "adventure."

Pittsburgh

Late Saturday night, in the temporary Saint Louis locker room underneath the University of Pittsburgh's Petersen Events Center, new Billikens head coach Rick Majerus rubbed his face crosswise and lengthwise, trying to invent things to say about a blowout win over Houston Baptist. Failing that, he diverted reporter questions towards more comfortable topics like food and politically-correct labels for ballplayers, and finally asked how things were going at his most recent employer, ESPN.

"They got you flying first class?"

"No, Coach," I replied. "I sleep in truck stops."

A sideways look. "Who's your agent?"