This is the tale of Snookums' and Filbert's voyage around the world.

Judy, Indian groom and bride, Snookums and Filbert – Hyderabad, India (October 18, 2007)

I must note that it was largely written by Snookums.  I basically did some editing, and took the pictures, but the story is largely from her point of view, except where it got too much and I had to re-write it to make myself look a bit better.  (Insert smiley here).

The stories are all completed and on Medary.com, but the system will publish them approximately one per day, until they are all posted here.  I'm doing that because they're a bit picture-intensive (as many as 10 pictures per post) and I don't want the site to take too long to load, as it might if I just dumped them out onto the public web site all at once.  But, if you just can't wait, you can get a jump on the process and read the entire tale of our journey by using the links below:

Part One is here.
Part Two is here.
Part Three is here.
Part Four is here.
Part Five is here.
Part Six is here.
Part Seven is here.
Part Eight is here.
Part Nine is here.
Part Ten is here.
Part Eleven is here.
Part Twelve is here.
Part Thirteen is here.
Part Fourteen is here.
Part Fifteen is here.
Part Sixteen is here.
Part Seventeen is here.
Part Eighteen is here.

Here, in one place, the complete set!

Contemplating a season of college basketball

The road to Shreveport

A nice day in Shreveport

Gametime Shreveport

Ice is not nice

Playing Catchup, pt. 1

Playing Catchup, pt. 2

The next weekend after our Western Illinois-IUPUI trip was supposed to find us again in Brookings, but we were deterred by some magic words issued by the Iowa Department of Transportation:

Towing Services Prohibited.

So, we stayed home and watched the Thursday night SDSU-UMKC game on the local cable sports channel, Metro Sports, then caught the Saturday games vs. Southern Utah on the Internet stream. Winter weather. What can you do?

Wow, that season went by incredibly fast. So fast that I fell far, far behind in posting the Road to the Summit series. It’s all over, now, the traveling to all of the Summit League basketball venues. We made it to all of them except Oral Roberts in Tulsa. I’m now sitting at my sister’s house here in South Dakota, waiting for the final weekend’s games in Frost Arena.

So, I’ll try to catch up, with the final two installments of the Road to the Summit.

I didn't sleep very well last night.  Who knows why--maybe it was the different bed in the Comfort Inn in Queens where we were staying.  Maybe it was a bit chilly in our room last night.  Maybe it was in part that I stayed up until 1:30 surfing the web, then couldn't really get to sleep.  At 5:30, I finally gave up and fired up the computer again, dinked around with it until a bit after seven, then turned it off, pulled another pillow over my head, and finally fell asleep.

Cemetery

I awoke to a shaking bed.  Snookums was . . . doing something.  I don't know what.  Actually, at the time, I knew what she was doing--something related to putting on clothes, I think.  Damned if I can remember now.  Snookums and her sister left to go get breakfast.  I sat and stared at the cemetery across the street for a while, then decided to take a shower.  I dressed and stumbled downstairs to the breakfast room.  I may have said something to Snookums, her sister, one of the coffee pots, or the Christmas tree they'd set up in the lobby.  I really don't know.  I looked at a copy of the USA Today.  Don't ask me what any of the articles were about.

(read more)

Here's what the plan was: We would fly out on Tuesday afternoon, in order to be in New York in plenty of time to board our cruise ship on Wednesday for our 10-day Caribbean cruise. Everything was in order--hotel reservations, airline tickets, everything.

Then . . .

ICE STORM!!!!!!

Ice storms are not good. Ice storms are bad. Ice storms are very, very bad. Ice storms are, if you will, not at all cool.

So, on Monday, the National Weather Service says "We're putting out an ICE STORM!!!!!! WARNING at 6 p.m. on Monday until noon on Tuesday." (They may have left off the all-caps and the extra exclamation points--I'm not sure.)

(Read more!)

Two words, more than any other strike fear into any rational resident of the Kansas City metro area:

Ice Storm.

Closely related are two other words:

Freezing Rain.

(Read More!)

Gametime approaches. So does a winter storm. Hurray! Well, it is basketball season . . . Snookums and I decide to change plans a bit, and so instead of going to Tulsa tomorrow, we'll go to Joplin, MO and see if the storm decides to go north. If it does, we'll run down I-44 to Tulsa for the Oral Roberts U. game. If it doesn't, we'll head back to KC during a window on Saturday afternoon where freezing rain is not expected on US 71. Go north, big storm, go north!

(want to read more?  Hit "read more" below.  Neat, huh?)

A quick pre-game post . . . we ran around Shreveport, doing a bit of shopping but mostly just scouting out the town between the luxurious Rodeway Inn and the Centenary campus.

(continue . . . click Read More below)

We're comfortably in our room at the luxurious Rodeway Inn in Shreveport, after a ten-and-one-half hour drive from Kansas City. Let me tell you a bit about the drive, in case you might in future years consider a road-trip to Shreveport from Brookings: it isn't that bad at all.

On the maps, it looks like a journey into the backroads, with minimal Interstate-level roads. It's basically U.S. 71 all the way from Kansas City to Shreveport. From Kansas City down all the way to Ft. Smith, Arkansas, there isn't more than a few miles of two-lane road. Most of it is near-Interstate-grade divided highway, with some intersections at grade, but with normal controlled-access Interstate type highways in most of the built-up areas. US 71 turns into I-540 in northwest Arkansas, going through Wal-Mart home Bentonville and Fayetteville, home of the University of Arkansas. The 30 miles or so from Bentonville to Fayetteville are basically one big city now. The metropolitan area contains nearly half a million people now, and is the sixth fastest growing metro area in the country.

(more . . . click the "Read More" link.)