It's 9:30pm on Day 2 of our Creating the Future midwest road tour. We are heading to the heartland, where folks in several states have invited us to teach them how to create a healthy, vibrant future for their communities. 

In three short weeks over long distances, we will teach how to build programs with communities, rather than for communities. We will teach how boards can govern so that communities thrive, organizations thrive, AND the boards themselves thrive. We will teach how consultants can transform their consulting practices, to become catalysts for creating the future.  We'll visit with friends and colleagues, meet with community leaders. 

We'll drive - a lot. We'll drink a lot of coffee. We'll laugh a lot, and we'll try not to gain any weight.

So far, we've had a good start.  Each of us has gotten a turn at getting work done in the car, and thanks to mobile broadband service, we’ve been able to send emails and even post this post from the middle of nowhere.  That alone is amazing.  Sometimes this old broad feels like she’s living in the Jetsons.

So here, from the space age of uploading on the road, is our trip so far.

Monday (Day 1)
Our departure from Tucson took its normal road trip turns for us - errands to run, stops to make, and by the time you know it, a 10am departure has us asking, “It’s already 1pm, should we just eat lunch here?”  

On our way to our last errand - a stop at the Food Bank to drop off some of the flip chart sheets we created in our planning work with them last week - the phone rings.  It’s Nick, who is taking care of the office and my house while we’re gone. “I’m checking on the office, and found the alarm wasn’t set. Did you guys leave? Are you coming back?”  I explain that no, we are on our way out, and that in our scramble to get everything done, we must have forgotten to set it.  “If you could see my face right now,” Nick tells me, “you’d see me utterly unsurprised.”  

We got through Phoenix with little traffic, but about 50 miles north of Phoenix, along the Black Canyon gorge, I-17 was closed by an accident.  By the time we got to Flagstaff, it was dinner time.

Flag was cold and wonderful, precisely what we Arizonans proudly expect.  We arrived just as the sun was setting, the gold of the aspens and cottonwoods painted ever more brilliant by the waning light.  Lit with that same brush stroke, a red hound in the back of a work truck looked like a god. Breathtaking.

Thai food, sitting next to 2 couples our age or so - one seemingly from the area, one visiting, telling of hiking conquests during their stay so far.  I hear one of the locals reciting the litany: “There are really only 2 liberal areas in this state - there’s Tucson, and there’s here. The rest of the state is insane.”  I sigh and turn back to my food.

A few phone calls, a stop for gas, and at 8pm we’re first starting on the longer leg of the day - the 350 miles or so to Albuquerque.
Dimitri worked on the promotional flyer for our “Consulting to Create the Future” workshop in Omaha, while Scissor Sisters, Freddy & Francine and the Kinks helped the miles zip by. The Interstate was desolate - late night truck traffic and little else, a blessing for the coyote who tried to cross the road in front of me, as I could swerve across all lanes at 80mph and not worry that anyone was behind me.  Several times I expressed my gratitude that we had chosen the longer yet more traveled route - late night driving along the back roads of southern New Mexico would not have been as easy as this straight-away.

The weather is cold and crisp and dry, western US clear.  Stopping at an exit on a tiny road leading to a tinier road, the sky was so filled with Milky Way goodness that truly I would have stayed there for an hour, just staring up.

Thanks to the time difference, we arrived in Albuquerque an hour later than we arrived.  Today, right now, we are in Texas, and it’s an hour later still.  With time zones pulling us forward an hour each day, I fear I may be a very old woman by the time we reach Indiana.

Tuesday (Day 2)
Having arrived in Albuquerque at 1:30am, it’s 9:30 before we drag our butts out of bed and head down to the free breakfast at the hotel. Hampton Inn has better coffee than any hotel coffee we’ve found, but even that isn’t doing it this morning. Starbucks has just made it to the on-the-way-out-of-town list.

Facing the hotel’s breakfast buffet, I am picturing a Food Network episode where chefs have to make a gourmet meal from the ingredients they find at a county fair.  With cheese and hard boiled eggs and peanut butter already in the cooler, the Hampton Inn’s bagels and sausages and condiments become the perfect lunch fixings.  

The stretch of road from Albuquerque east to Norman, Oklahoma will have only intermittent cell signal. A call I have been looking forward to for weeks - to plan how we might move the field of evaluation to something more constructive than its current punitive approach - is eventually cancelled as the call keeps dropping.

Finally we arrive in Tucamcari, New Mexico, an old Route 66 town with particular meaning for us: one of our consultant grads, Vicki Watson, works at the Small Business Development Center at Mesalands Community College in this tiny town.  She has told us so much about the area that even the exit sign on the freeway make us feel as if we have somehow been here before.

Tucamcari does not disappoint.  There are murals everywhere - murals of the natural environment, murals of old Route 66, murals of Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe and James Dean.  The Community College has just added a school for studying wind power, with a huge wind turbine jutting out of the flat ground as if the land has given birth to a lone Empire State Building. 

Just like we felt when we were staring at the stars last night, we wish we could hang out and just shoot photos all day.  Instead, we have just enough time to stop in to Vicki’s office to hopefully surprise her.  Not surprisingly, the surprise was on us.  Vicki wasn’t in today. She was out doing what she does - traveling and convening community members to build upon the strengths of communities like Tucamcari, who have so much to build upon yet who feel as if they have nothing.  We picture Vicki’s smile and the sing-song lilt of her Texas drawl as we leave a note telling her we miss her.

Stop to get gas, shoot as many photos as we can on our way back out of town, and we’re on our way again.  It’s dark now, about an hour away from Oklahoma City.  I got several large chunks of work done on this drive, and that feels so good. Being sequestered, with little ability to connect to the world - it’s a blessing (especially on this election night, when I know I’d be checking news feeds every few minutes). The scenery is beautiful, the company great, the weather bright and crisp. And the only election results are coming in from the occasional phone call - Rand Paul, Christine O’Donnell. There will be plenty of time to catch up when we read USA Today at the hotel with breakfast tomorrow.

Tomorrow Day 3 will begin in Norman, Oklahoma.  We’ll find a walking trail (yes we will!) which will allow us to keep our promise to not gain a million pounds in this 3 weeks, AND to see a smidge of what’s pretty in Norman.  From there, the road calls.

Click here for the ongoing journey!