Notes from the Road

Greetings from Kearney, Nebraska, the third-night stopover on my five-day drive across the country.  The trip is going well so far, and I'm hoping to be approaching the Wyoming / Utah border by tomorrow night.  While this hasn't been a very sports-intensive weekend for me so far, I did have a few relevant notes I wanted to pass along.

• I recently got a new HTC Incredible for school and, while I primarily intend to use it to access email and make phone calls, it makes following sports incredibly convenient, too.  Getting up to speed on MLB and college football scores this weekend was super easy.  This likely warrants a post of its own sometime in the near future, but I have a feeling that the Incredible may have a profound impact on my ability to follow my favorite teams.
• The first half of this trip has been filled with college gridiron landmarks.  We had to pay a higher-than-expected nightly rate at a Holiday Inn Express in Howe, Indiana after our first day because we were within a short drive of South Bend on the Friday night before Notre Dame's opening contest against Purdue.  I also drove through or passed some other excellent college football towns that I might never visit again, including Iowa City (University of Iowa), Lincoln (University of Nebraska), State College (Penn State) and others. 
• I was especially excited to pass by Grinnell, Iowa and see signs for Grinnell College.  For those of you that don't know, Grinnell is somewhat famous in the college basketball world, mainly for their run-and-gun, high-scoring style.  Sometimes called the "Anti-Princeton Offense," the scheme known in Grinnell as "The System" has produced a number of highly competitive teams at the D-III level.  As a big Princeton hoops fan, it was interesting to pass by the school that's basically bizarro-Princeton from a basketball standpoint.
• Lots of NASCAR gear out here.  At a gas station near the Iowa / Nebraska border, there was a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Dale Earnhart, Jr. just outside the entrance to the restroom.  Probably not something you'd see at a Mobil station on Long Island.

Tomorrow's it's on through the rest of Nebraska (yes, it's as flat as they say) and on into Wyoming.  I'm targeting a Tuesday evening arrival into California, and I'll try to post this week either from the road again or from my new digs in Palo Alto.  Until then, there'll be plenty of scores to check on the HTC Incredible.