Chris Cuellar – Daily Staff Writer

Interstate 35 South has gotten shorter in the six days. Trekking with the Iowa State football team for the unaffiliated Iowa State Daily to two straight Big 12 North games, the road can seem long, and even boring to journalists. That shouldn’t be the case, but there are, in fact, ways to shorten the trip and cut miles off of the long highway.

Assistant Sports Editor Jake Lovett and I are done rolling down the road for the evening, posting up at a Sleep Inn about 40 minutes from the University of Kansas’ Memorial Stadium, preparing for Iowa State’s football game tomorrow afternoon. A late start, but solid decision to make the trip to Lawrence on Friday evening rather than at 5:30 on Saturday morning made for a dusk car ride from the comforts of Ames after class to an economic hotel outside of Kansas City. A bargain for two beds, the Sleep Inn provides all the amenities two college wannabe writers need, which is to say nothing more than a Starbucks parking lot would give. Wi-fi, and ice machine, and some blurry ESPN is all we could ask for, but a relaxing end to a very atypical Friday night.

No beer specials, no late night CyRide, just getting off the beaten path in Southern Iowa, and stopping for food we could afford.

Within the first half-hour, Jake and I realized we hadn’t eaten dinner, and that a Fazoli’s in Des Moines may only be 30 minutes from home base, but it would make for a good first stop. Breadsticks and meaty spaghetti might make you want to stick around, but football in the near future means that Merle Hay Road isn’t our end.

Once back on I-35, we plan our next move, and discuss everything from music to the future, and the absolutely dim Iowa skyline that has been littered with half-empty corn fields and orange construction cones falls down far enough to realize we need a kick in the pants. And some gas.

Lamoni, Iowa, about five miles from the Missouri border seems like an alright spot to get that evening kick in the pants. A stale doughnut is replaced by chocolate covered peanuts, a diet is replaced by a stomach making decisions, and a friendship is nearly replaced by one’s disdain for all things coffee. Conflict Managers hasn’t repaired a friendship so quickly, as a two hour drive to Kansas City got a helluva lot shorter with some well-timed Friday night lights.

High school football isn’t our goal, and eight man football is about as close to Big 12 football as JaMarcus Russell is to Peyton Manning, but it’s the perfect place to rediscover the whole purpose of road trips.

I should get lustily descriptive about the game, but consider this: journalistic road trips to sporting events happen en mass every weekend, but they often consist of humorous banter at a convenience store, or a great song coming on the radio. Two state-school students didn’t consider I-35 on a Friday night would be a mini-Mecca, but the Lamoni Demons taking on the Grandview Park Baptist Defenders on an 80-yard long football field made for sacred ground.

Eight man football is a game designed for creative gym teachers, an athletic and intelligent quarterback that is required to make every play, and a crowd that loves seeing their kids have fun in competition. A Grandview spread offense with four receivers and three linemen were facing off against a classic flexbone option Lamoni team, and while Grandview’s quarterback/safety/coach’s son took over the game for the Defenders, no one will be more pleased with what they did on that Friday night than the players on the field.

Chills and a need to get to the aforementioned hotel took over once Grandview went up by 20, so the last two hours of the ride flew by with good music, convenience store banter, a semi-cold Frappuccino, and a deeply serious search for a future in media. We decided the media will find itself in the future, but we needed to find the truth ourselves in our schooling, our internships, and how we were managing our careers as journalist-students. In that order.

The truth is getting murkier and murkier, and two hours of dark road in Missouri is a forum, but definitely not the answer to the question.

Sometimes, all the truth you need is found in conversing about sentence structure ten minutes before talking about how Erick Aybar shouldn’t hit Josh Beckett.

ESPN and a wi-fi connection can be better than a therapist, which is what the Cyclones might need tomorrow after taking on a ridiculously potent Kansas Jayhawk football team.

The trip is meant to cover Iowa State football, but even as fans when we’re not working, the trip’s merit isn’t based on whether the Cyclones win or lose. It’s about finding the truth, hoping our future gets a little nudge from a good performance at a nationally covered football game, and whether or not it it was worth our time to make the trip in the end.

To eight-man football and frappuccino’s.