Yesterday we left our Indiana home.

Destination: San Francisco, California. Route: Highway 80. One Prius packed with one man, one woman, one golden retreiver/collie mix, one maine coon cat, one Juiceman, Jr., two Macs and whatever clothes would fill in in the crevices. Every boot was stuffed with socks. Every sock was stuffed with dreams.

This morning we awoke in room 113 at the EconoLodge, West Liberty, Iowa. There was, as they say in Indiana, "frost on the pumpkin."

"We're getting out just in time," Audrey said.

I walked Elijah through the field across the parking lot. He fertilized the frozen corn and did his part to make the barbed wire rustier.

When we arrived last night all we could talk about was pizza. But nothing much happens in a commercial venture kind of way in Iowa past 10 pm. Our one option was twenty miles away in Iowa City. I went for it. God protects a man on a mission. I made it back in time to savor hours of motel living. Blue carpet, poofy chairs, baseboard heat, HBO, bathroom fan with a built in heater, ice machine.

Every road trip from my youth culminated in a visit to the hotel pool with my dad and a visit to the ice machine with my mom. Mom would get a diet coke, a bucket of ice, return to the room and smoke a Parliament Lights 100 over a cold diet coke in a plastic cup.

I imitated the bucket of ice part last night just to hear the sound of crystalized water chunks bouncing on top of each other in a plastic bucket. My heart leapt with every tap of every cube and as I carried it back to Room 113, where Audrey, Elijah and Pico waited, I felt proud, and young again.