author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

Greetings from Columbia, Missouri, home of the 87th Missouri FFA Convention! We reached Kansas City, KS/MO by about 7 PM and felt we had it in us to push on. Discovering that the convention had eaten up almost every single hotel room in Columbia almost made us regret that decision. But the check-in clerk at the Red Roof Inn, who was the one to give us the worrisome news, volunteered to call over at the Budget Host Inn (which was sufficiently off I-70 that we might not have found it ourselves), ascertained that they did indeed have a vacancy, and gave us directions down the road.

And now here we are. We've brought our suitcases and computer bags in for the night, had some munchies out of our travel snack arsenal, and gotten comfortable. I've traced my skater number on my arms with henna so they'll be nice and dark come Saturday afternoon. (Don't worry; I'll wrap them to protect the sheets from getting henna stains overnight.) And I'm planning to sleep with my boom-mike headset on for its big, ear-covering cushions. The FFA attendees appear for the most part to occupy the central intersection of the venn diagram of "young," "noisy," and "oblivious," and I don't want to be woken up all night.

So I guess we drove some 10 to 12 hours today. Didn't really feel it. I took Boulder to Goodland, KS. John took over until Salina, KS. Then I took us into Columbia. It was fun. John and I used to do mega-epic road trips back in our college days, when we had the whole summer to play with. We'd go all the way from southern Oregon to New Orleans and back in two weeks. This is our first multi-day road trip since then, but we seem to have retained the knack. The knack requires a satisfying variety of travel snacks and drinks, more music than we'll ever need in a month, and a high tolerance for each other's company in a small space. All of which we have. The modern laptops and the AC inverter that plugs into the cigarette lighter only make things that much easier. We joke that in another life, or an alternate universe, we'd team up to drive freight for a living.

When we left Boulder, it was pouring down snow and visibility was crappy. And traffic on I-270 was horrendous. But once we were on I-70 we left all of that behind... just in time to drive through not one but two thunderstorms in Kansas. (The forecast said "slight chance." I suppose we just got lucky.) But in eastern Kansas, as the terrain got hilly, the weather got gorgeous. Everything was lovely until sunset, when we hit Kansas City. Then it was dark, which made it hard to tell if anything was lovely. I thing most of it was intercity sprawl; the town names seemed to come at very frequent intervals.

Oddly, I did not manage to get any writing done in the car. John only took one driving shift to my two, and during his shift I ended up reading aloud from a copy of Mind Gym (Gary Mack and David Casstevens) which the All Stars coach is having everyone in the team take turns borrowing and reading. It's a little cheesy at times, this book, but it's given me some good insights, and just in time to use them, too.

(So I'm trying to make up for that lack of writing and other daily duties tonight before I go to sleep. Good luck me.)

I'll arrive at the tournament pre-bruised. Sunday's practice involved all the hitting drills you can possibly think of, and my left upper arm is now sporting two huge, colorful, and perfectly round "derby kisses." They're showy even by derby standards; even other skaters have been commenting on them, or just making that hissing wince noise. The coach said it looked like someone had stood me up in front of a tennis ball service machine. Everyone told me I should take pictures, so here's one with the bruises and the numbers made of fresh henna-goop applied on top of Sharpie.

And that's all I got for now. Time to go do my daily foam roller hell while John takes a turn reading to me. Goodnight!