The One in Four National SUV Tour Begins...

Imagine that you're behind the wheel of your enormous, 37 foot steel home, hurtling down the highway toward your destination, when suddenly you find that pressing on the gas pedal suddenly doesn't seem to really do anything anymore. Most of us have been driving along in a car before and have had it break down - that can be frustrating. But when the accelerator of the RV broke down on Friday night, leaving us stranded in a Walmart parking lot in Wauseon, Ohio, we understood for the first time that when desperate times call for us give up our "car" to be repaired, we have to give up our "home," too. We spent all of Saturday locating an RV servicer that would be able to service our specific type of RV (service would have to wait until Tuesday, because the RV broke down at the beginning of Labor Day weekend). We also had the RV towed across Ohio to the service station by a special towing service that could handle moving our massive automobile.

Thus began a new phase for us, a time we jokingly call the "One in Four National SUV Tour," which lasted for the next two weeks. We've rented an SUV, and have been driving around in it for the past few days, and will continue to until after our stops in New Orleans and Alabama.  Adjusting to actually living out of a car was rough at first - there are a lot of aspects of traveling that are really nice that we gave up by being in an SUV (like the ability to go to the bathroom without stopping every time one of the four of us has to go!), but it really wasn't that bad. It's definitely pushed the level of our adventure to a new limit - it was kind of like taking a road trip from our road trip - and we all appreciated our RV home all the more when we were reunited with her after a few weeks!

After driving through the night in our newly rented SUV, we arrived at Siena College in New York around 8AM, and slept for a bit before our contact person there let us into the showers at Siena's workout facilities, followed by a trip to the dining hall for a bit of all-you-can-eat breakfast.  We enjoyed the food, but at that point the excitement of the adventuresome aspects to everything that had happened gave way to the utter tiredness we were all feeling.  Fortunately, our contact person at Siena was sympathetic, and arranged for a hotel room for us - so we went back and slept for the whole afternoon, emerging when it was time to prepare for our evening presentations.

There were over 300 students in our first workshop, and about 170 students in the second, which means that we had a big stage and a nice sound system at our disposal to help us project throughout the large room.  A few of us - Dan in particular - has found presenting to large groups particularly fun. When we're talking in a big room to a large audience, there's a part of us that has to step up and communicate in a "bigger" way, and we've found that a fun challenge to step up to.  These audiences were freshman students having their orientation, and included more female students than male ones - which presented an added challenge for us, as we had to think on the fly about how to best cater our presentation to these students while maintaining the "all-male" focus of the Men's Program.  All in all it went well - Siena was definitely a good stop on our tour.

Stay tuned for updates on how the tour has gone at Washington College in Maryland, Tulane University in New Orleans, and University of South Alabama. We'll be updating again shortly!