My Travels with Sandy

We made it back safe and reasonably sound from the epic trip to Guymon, Oklahoma. I've managed to fill up over 130 posts, with dozens of pictures and videos, relating to the odyssey in the OKexcellence blog, so I won't be spending a ton of time analyzing the trip here - although there will be some more reflective pieces later on. At this point all I'd like to document is what an amazing travelling companion Sandy Zale, the "Sage of Sayville," turned out to be. I think it would be fair to say that Sandy and I both possess over-sized personalities, which gave some folks more than a little trepidation in regards to the thought of us being trapped in the same car together for two and a half weeks. I think Mike Lange summed the fear up rather succintly with two words: shallow grave. That said, Sandy and I got along famously, with not one cross word uttered (and with my infamous temper that's really saying something). The best proof of how well we got along is that not once in two and a half week and four thousand miles did we turned on the radio or pop in a CD in the car. And with the exception of one night in Parkersburg, WV when I was in the lobby trying to track down some wifi and Sandy managed to find his watch show on the shopping network (don't ask, none of us understand this mania - although it has a certain charming Professor Moriarty feel to it), did we even turn on the TV. I filmed a couple hours of Sandy holding forth along our drive. Normally I'd wait until he was driving and then I'd ask him a question about some aspect of the trip, and he'd hold forth for a few minutes. I'm slowly posting the greatest hits on the OKexcellence blog. What I wish I had filmed were the countless hours we spent discussing politics, teaching, philosophy, women (and that was truly the blind leading the blind) and life in general. I had the most amazing time and I can't thank him enough for including me on his quest for America. Part of what made this trip so great is that it was just two friends spending time together. In some ways the high point of the journey on that front was the night we spent at Braff's Sports Bar in Emporia, Kansas, playing twelve games of pool while tornadoes bounced around us on the Kansas plains. The other thing that made this trip so memorable was that it was carried out in the shadow of the impending trip to Abu Dhabi and a year spent in the Middle East. Maybe I needed some time in America before embarking so far afield. My good friend Cyndi Brandenburg has entitled this summer the Summer of Scudder, when we're all going to spend a lot of time together before I head off to the great unknown. I guess the trip to Guymon was a remarkably worthy kick-off.