Red State Road Trip - Part 2

[[ Here is Part 2 of Andrew's RSRT series, with Part 3 to come on Friday or Saturday. Enjoy -  be back with some thoughts of my own later in the day -- Pete]]

The first two hours of the drive from Amarillo took me through sparse semi-desert to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.  From there I was into familiar territory around Colorado Springs.  Sylvia, Cathleen and I had visited a small mountain town called Manitou Springs in 1997 when Cathleen was five months old.  It was the week after Princess Diana was killed in a Paris car accident, and I'd been astonished that the war memorial was decked with impromptu bouquets and letters to a woman no-one in the town could ever have met.

I was pushing on at speed, because the first tennis of the Red State Road Trip beckoned.  OK-k, who describes himself as a long time read and occasional poster, had eMailed me after my first post to the Tribe, and we'd arranged to meet at 6pm in Denver.  I arrived at the Queen Anne Inn at 5:25pm, and just had enough time to get my gear into the room and change into a tracksuit when my hitting partner arrived.

This was the second time I'd met someone from the Tribe in person: I'd spent a memorable weekend with steggy, Ray Stonada and Pete at Indian Wells in February this year.  OK-k and I were barely two minutes into the drive to the tennis courts, and our inner geeks were loose: he works in computer security, and I - don't, but love to talk tech.  He figured that because I was from Houston, any tennis below 70 degrees F was likely to cause me frostbite (plus there was some wind picking up) so we played indoors.

OK-k and I rallied for about an hour and a half, and he displayed a really nice crosscourt running FH.

NFL fans will need no telling that Denver is a mile high, and the balls really fizz and pop off the court.  I also learned that the lower air resistance causes less bite on the fuzzy tennis balls, so it's harder to impart spin.  That's my excuse for the number of times my pinpoint groundstrokes went a foot long.

After tennis, it was time for supper - I suggested a sports bar, and when the first choice turned out to be closed, there was nothing for it but to repair to a bar where the waitresses were identically dressed in white t shirts and orange shorts.  I'm sure they were very fetching, but my eyes stayed on the drubbing San Diego was handing out to the Colts (sorry, Ryan).

I didn't stay out too late, because I was setting my alarm for the middle of the morning.  After a couple of false starts, I was up at 4am with my laptop wirelessly connected to TennisWorld and the TMC feed from Shanghai.  After a half an hour, it looked like Federer would make short enough work of Gonzalez to give me a decent shot at a couple of additional hours of sleep.  But it was not to be - as you know, the Chilean rallied, took the second set tie-break, staved off multiple BPs in the 3rd set, then thrillingly broke Federer and served out for a famous victory.

It goes without saying that the technology to make this happen just didn't exist even five years ago - wireless laptops in a Denver B&B downloading a live tennis match from China.  But OK-k and I were far more interested, when we talked about TennisWorld, in the human side of the Internet.

There were two aspects to this which jumped out at us.  The first was the way like minded people all across the globe could become connected and form a genuine community.  The second, which is a particular interest of mine, is the way you can create interactions with a very high signal-to-noise ratio.

I constantly marvel at the high quality of the posts at TW - not just Pete's writing, which first drew me to the site.  Or the increasingly confident guest posts, the tournament reports and the statistical insights.  Many of the comment threads are joys to read days later.  I'm a blog junkie (all kinds of politics, economics and science sites) and there are very few places with this blend of knowledge, freshness and cameraderie.

From Denver it was a fairly short hop to Casper, WY.  I stopped off for coffee in Cheyenne, - which turns out NOT to be the home of NORAD's end-of-the-world command bunker (that's in Colorado Springs), but which does have some very impressive free-standing intercontinental missiles.

As I drove on north, I found the Wyoming landscape desolate and uninviting.  This time, my journey was done by just after 3pm.  When I got to my B&B, I had a very pleasant surprise - the landlords had scouted out an indoor tennis club, and the club pro fixed me up with a very friendly fellow in the insurance business, Mike Hudson, who described himself in an offhand way as a "low 5.0."

Well, I held my own in the warm-up, but once we began a set I was in trouble.

He had a nasty kick serve to the ad court: I found I could slice it back, only to set up a put away volley to the deuce court.  When he hit an ace down the T with the same service preparation, I decided it was force majeure.  I held him to one break of serve, but couldn't create any BPs of my own.  No matter - it was an unanticipated pleasure, and I had to smile when I saw the rack of Tennis magazines on display in the club bar.

Casper turned out to be a lovely town, and with high winds in the forecast for the drive to Montana, I thought about staying an extra day.  Eventually, valor won out over discretion, and I aimed for the mountains again.  I had the pleasure of playing soccer with a dog called Chaz just outside Buffalo, WY: even though it was 38F and windy, he was outside flicking stones with his paws at the gas station.  I got to Billings in time for lunch, and was treated to David Ferrer's upset of Nadal on ESPN; then it was on to Bozeman, a gorgeous drive.

Night was coming in and light flakes of snow were coming down as I started the final leg from Bozeman to Helena.  The route I took, along 69 to Boulder, was the first time I was nervous on the drive - no houses, few cars, not the right time to get a flat.  I exhaled when I rejoined highway 15, and by 7:15pm I was phoning the housekeeper of the Elkhorn Lodge at Clancy for directions.  Up the hill a couple of miles, gravel road, dirt road, follow it round to the right...15 minutes later I was calling her for directions again.

10 minutes later, I was in a place the GPS told me didn't exist.  The road ended in an impassable clump of trees.  I was hopelessly and completely lost. To be continued. . .

--- Andrew