Mickey a la Cart Van

Lisa D. Mickey will offer an inside view of the Duramed FUTURES Tour and its players throughout the 2007 season. Visit "Mickey a la Cart" for an "extra" view of the Tour from her own "mobile office".

Eleven Weeks on the Road: An Insider’s View

By Lisa D. Mickey

We are 11 tournaments into the season and that means there have been a lot of highway miles logged in the green company van I share with my colleague, Johanna Josefsson. We make interesting traveling companions. She’s from Sweden; I’m from North Carolina. She’s in her 30s; I’m in my 40s. We listen to the same music, like the same food, both visit Starbucks on a daily basis, and fortunately, are extremely compatible to spend so many hours together – which is a good thing. Once you hit the road in March, there’s really no going back until the season is over in September. Our colleagues back at Duramed FUTURES Tour headquarters call us “Thelma and Louise.”

One thing I have learned, it doesn’t matter how old you are or how long you have had a traveling job, your parents still “watch” where you are going. My parents have a dog-eared atlas that they use to “follow” me around the country. Johanna’s parents in Sweden knew we were recently driving from Decatur, Ill., to Cincinnati, and as she spoke to them by cell phone from the highway, her mom told her which way to go. I guess parents don’t really change either, in spite of the fact that it is now you behind the wheel.

There’s no glamour in this kind of travel. It is an adventure, for sure, but traveling on the road with a golf tour is a series of bad mattresses, weak hotel showerheads, sometimes-questionable laundry mats, a lot of helpful people, funky food, scary pit stops along the highway, clothing changes in parking garages and enough strange weather to qualify you to work at The Weather Channel.

The two Florida stops were easy enough, since the first one was in Lakeland – approximately 1.2 miles from my front door. Tampa was a half-hour commute, so again, it was easy. But the real fun started with the drive on Easter Sunday to Frisco, Texas by way of Baton Rouge, La. That ride was easier this year than last.

Last year, we witnessed the Hurricane Katrina devastation of New Orleans as we cruised along I-10. Giant billboards were twisted and bowed to the ground, beaten down by the wind. The remnants of flooding was visible – with people’s salvageable belongings stored in PODS units stacked on city streets. Johanna and I ended up getting behind a truck on I-10 carrying a load of scrap metal last year. A four-foot-long piece of sheet metal with screws dangling out of it flew off the back of the truck, bounced off the highway and speared the van through the radiator. We were fortunate it didn’t come through the windshield. And we were grateful to the cowboy in Lafayette, La., who put his boot on the front bumper and yanked the shrapnel out. There was none of that this year, thank goodness, although there were plenty of armadillos and snakes between Louisiana and Texas that didn’t make it to the other side.

Our first stop in Frisco, Texas was for dinner at IKEA. Yes, the Swedish furniture store serves food, so that’s where Johanna and I ate several nights. Our hotel there was the Westin, which gets the award for the weary traveler. Let me just say that everything that is advertised about the Westin’s great beds and multiple showerheads is true. I slept like a baby that week and showered like a queen. And then it was back to Lafayette, La. On the way out of Frisco, Johanna and I stopped by Jamba Juice to get smoothies for breakfast. While we waited, we had a couple of those wheat-grass shots. Now, that stuff is supposed to be healthy and good for you, but all I know is about an hour later, I’m telling Johanna to pull the van off the side of the highway. There’s nothing like hurling a peanut-butter-protein smoothie with wheat-grass alongside a highway as the rest of the world blows by. And all I was trying to do was eat healthy on the road!

Maybe it was a good thing that we ate salmon and salads and drank protein drinks in Frisco, because once we got to Lafayette, we ate crawfish in just about every imaginable recipe. The food there is tasty, but rich, and probably the reason why heart surgeons flock to Louisiana. One of the locals said, “We live well, but we don’t live long.” Amen, brother.

From Louisiana, it was on to McAllen, Texas, which, if you don’t have an atlas or don’t know how to Map Quest on-line, is about five miles from the Mexican border. You realize that when you are driving along and suddenly, you come upon these serious-looking men with guns and harnessed dogs operating the border patrol. These guys don’t mess around. You take off your sunglasses, smile, and whatever they ask you for, you give them. No joking around – even if you are an American-born citizen. Those places are scary even if you have nothing to hide.

Texas is just a whole different country. You can drive for days and never leave the state. You can drive through the rolling foothills, past fields of bluebonnets, through the desert, past windmills and oil wells and through hustling cities like Houston, San Antonio, Dallas and El Paso. I liked one billboard in particular as we drove and drove through South Texas. It was a sign with big letters for a local store advertising its “snake-proof boots” – which would be helpful whenever you drink wheat grass in Texas and have to get out of the car in a hurry beside the highway. Of course, when you drive in South Texas, there aren’t a lot of places to stop when you are on certain lonely highways. After we left McAllen, I think there were two restaurant-gas stations within the next 200 miles, so even if you get your Starbucks and are cruising along, feeling kind of happy, suddenly it hits you. Uh, oh, I need to go … Again, there just aren’t that many places to “go,” and you sure as shootin’ had better watch your step when it comes to the high grass. Poor Johanna. She had to ease the van about 25 yards down a dirt road beside the highway and wait with the engine running while my expensive Starbucks venti unsweetened black ice tea made a quick exit. I was trying to hide and to hurry. As soon as I got back into the van and we got back on the highway, player Katrina Leckovic and her dad blew by in their rental car. She never said anything, so hopefully, they never saw anything, either.

But you do see some interesting things in Texas. I saw Babe Didriksen Zaharias’s museum in Beaumont, but Johanna was on the cell phone to Sweden, so she was ignoring my hand motions to stop and be a tourist. I also saw former major league pitcher Nolan Ryan’s hometown, but they don’t play baseball in Sweden, and the only stop we made in Refugio, Texas was to Dairy Queen. I also saw a tombstone store that had various samples of head stones out front with a big sign across the front window that bore the message: “Spring Sale.” Hmmm, I’m sure that brought customers running with their checkbooks.

It is a LONG way to El Paso from anywhere and a REALLY LONG way from El Paso to Elk City, Okla., when you’re trying to get there in 14 hours. We were driving from El Paso to Elk City and from Elk City to Kansas City around the same time Kansas was getting clobbered by heavy rains and terrible tornados. We were watching the skies as we drove in miserable weather. (And yes, my parents were back home watching The Weather Channel with their trusty atlas during that trek.) For the first time in my life, I saw what weather forecasters mean when they warn of “flash flooding.” Kansas creeks had become rivers, and rivers had become lakes, and fields of young corn looked more like rice paddies. Johanna and I drove and drove, with me becoming the coach late one night as she hugged the steering wheel, trying to see through tired eyes that struggled to peer through sticky contact lenses. I kept saying, “OK, Johanna, we have just 20 more miles … Now, we have just 12 more miles … and it will be the next exit … and we’re almost there.” We got there, dragged in the necessary bags at 1:30 a.m., went to sleep, and got up at 7 a.m. to drive on to Kansas City, where we had a plane to catch. Once we reached Kansas City, we had about 15 minutes to repack our bags to board our flights, so we drove to a Sheraton near the airport, pulled all of our stuff out into the parking lot, repacked, changed clothes in the Sheraton restroom and made a mad dash to the airport. Let’s just say, if you need a lesson on how two people can each check two bags at the curb separately without moving the vehicle, just ask Thelma and Louise…

We’re told that downtown Kansas City is a great place, but we never saw anything but the hotel, Starbucks, and the golf course. In fact, we took a different route to Leawood South Country Club each day. I’m the one who usually gets lost, but I found myself saying, “Johanna, what if we just stop and ask somebody how to get to the clubhouse.” One of the first days we were there, we drove around and around the golf course, but couldn’t figure out how to get to the clubhouse from the residential streets surrounding the course. We could see it, but we couldn’t get to it. And to make matters worse, we saw one of our rules officials tooling along in her golf cart while we were just trying to get there. But both of us couldn’t exactly duck in a moving van.

My big adventure in Kansas City involved filing my stories for the Weekly News Release, which goes out to fans and media each Monday. Each Sunday night, I write the tournament wrap story about the tournament that just ended, and then I hunker down with a lot of caffeine and write the Monday feature and various other notes and shorter stories for the release. I typically finish writing between 4-5 a.m. So that night in Kansas, I finished the Weekly Release and tried to send it. No Internet. I put on my shoes, took my computer and went downstairs to the hotel’s business center and tried to send from there. No luck. From there, I moved to the lobby, and then I found the hotel manager and we tried an Ethernet cord. No luck. We even called the “Help Desk” only to be told that the hotel’s Internet was down and he wasn’t sure when it was going to be back up. Soooooo, I go back upstairs to my room, get the van keys and start driving around to other hotels on the street. I stop under their porticos with my laptop in my hands behind the steering wheel and try to pick up their wireless Internet signal to send my release. After three different hotels, no luck! So, it’s now around 4:30 a.m., and I’m starting to panic. I drive around until I find a Panera Bread restaurant. With my laptop in my hands, I run up to the front window of the store and the bakers are inside looking out at me. Through the glass, I’m screaming, “Do you have wireless?” And they scream back, “What?” “Wireless?” What?” This goes on for a while and finally they tell me, “No!” So, I run into a 24-hour Kinko’s next door and asked the sleepy man inside, “Do you have wireless? Please, please say yes.” And the man tells me no, but that they get a really strong signal from Panera’s next door! And so I open my laptop at Kinko’s at 4:45 a.m., pick up Panera’s wireless signal, and my release springs forth into Cyber World. The sun wasn’t yet up, but I heard the birds singing as I got back into the van. I thought about how worried my parents would be if they knew I ran around in the night in strange towns just trying to do my job. It’s a glamorous life --- NOT!

Thelma and Louise had yet another adventure in an airport. Because I work all night on Sundays, we get a late start each Monday morning, which means we have to hustle to make airline connections in other states when we fly home on Monday nights for off-weeks. The week after Kansas City was one of those weeks, so we tried to hustle to Chicago’s Midway Airport from Kansas City to make our 6:30 p.m. flights. Of course, we got stuck behind a train while on Chicago’s Cicero Avenue and we were both in a sweat when we finally made it to curb-side check-in at Midway. But we got our bags checked, and took off to park the van in economy parking, where we had to catch a bus to go back to the airport terminal. You can almost guess the story. As we sat in traffic, inching toward the terminal, we saw our plane roar overhead. Fortunately, we were able to catch a 9 p.m., flight to Orlando. And more fortunately, we were able to convince a good friend to pick us up at 1 a.m.

Lake Geneva, Wis., is a beautiful playground for successful Chicago businesspeople who need to decompress in the country on the weekends. We stayed at the Inns at Geneva National, which was incredibly comfortable and within walking distance of the club and its fitness center. Johanna and I went to a fun little local restaurant-watering hole called “Mars” down beside Lake Como and directly across the water from Geneva National. If you go late enough, you can watch the sun set and see the raccoons come out to forage for food. The translated Swedish word for raccoon is “laundry bear,” which is perfect, since they wash their food and have little pudgy bear-like bodies.

Lake Geneva’s serene countryside setting is a vast contrast to the industrial landscape of Hammond and Gary, Ind. Lake Geneva smells like honeysuckle and hay. The industrial section of Hammond and Gary smells like a petroleum refinery and if you’re on the course late enough, you can see fire flickering out of the tops of smokestacks. My lasting impression of Hammond was the huge billboard with a man wanted for murder beside the highway when you turn off for the golf course. I hope the people there love the splendid oasis of Lost Marsh Golf Course, which is completely surrounded by industrial sprawl. Hats off to those who developed this tract for kids to come to the course’s First Tee program. It must be the only block for miles with grass and birds and open space for children to feel the wind in their faces and to know there is a kinder, more gentle world out there for them.

Maybe it’s because I’ve spent way too much time over the years in traffic jams on Cicero Avenue trying to reach or leave Chicago’s Midway Airport, but I’ve never been a fan of the Windy City. (I lean toward New York and Boston.) My impression of Chicago was always one of cement, seedy storefronts and car exhausts. Johanna, on the other hand, loves Chicago because it reminds her of a combination of New York City and Santa Monica, Calif. I told her to feel free to try to change my mind about this American city. So since it was 25 minutes from Lost Marsh Golf Course and we wanted something other than fast food one night, we visited Chicago. First, we watched the sun set over the city from the Signature Lounge at the top of the John Hancock Building, then we walked down the street for dinner at Carmine’s Italian restaurant -- bumping into Tour member Kelly Froelich at one of those small outdoor tables. OK, Johanna was successful. Chicago is pretty nice in warm weather, but I still wouldn’t want to be there when the winter blows in from Lake Michigan.

Decatur, Ill., is an easy three-hour drive from Hammond. It’s a soy town and when the wind is right, it smells of soy products cooking from the food mega-producer ADM. There’s a vast contrast in the smell of petroleum products (Hammond) to the soy beans of Decatur. Former Tour member Michelle Murphy of Portland, Ore., once told me that she loved to go to Decatur “because the whole town smells like fried chicken.” I don’t know about that, but the locals do say, “It’s the smell of money.” My first memory of Decatur was a few years ago when I drove into the course’s parking lot and some sirens were wailing. I made the mistake of asking players from California what those wailing horns were and they said, “There are a lot of factories around here, so it’s probably quittin’ time.” I should have known better, especially as I spied a few twirly-looking dark clouds and the golf course staff was rounding up golf carts and directing people inside. Decatur is one of those places that has rolled out the red carpet to our players for years – 23 years, to be exact. It’s a special place that invites everybody, and pretty much everybody comes out to the tournament at least once during the week. It’s an easy stop on the Tour, from the way the media embraces the event and writes pages and pages of stories about our players, right down to the best laundry mat on Tour at Pride Cleaners and Launderers on Main Street. Johanna and I went there twice. I guess we left about $25 worth of quarters in their whirling, clean machines.

A traveling topic worth its own blog is the subject of hotels. Let’s just say there are good hotels, a few great hotels and a handful of bad hotels. We typically arrive at each week’s destination on late Monday night and there was one hotel stop this season where I had moved into my third room by Thursday night. It wasn’t because I am picky. When I get a bad hotel room, I try to consider it as fancy camping. But for a non-smoker to live in a room for a week that has been used as a smoking room makes for a very long and miserable week. If you are a smoker, PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE do not smoke in non-smoking rooms! Johanna’s room was bad enough at that same Tour stop that it made her face swell up, break out and she couldn’t wear her contact lenses for three days. And then there was the hotel in a recent city with a sign that said the halls were frequently patrolled by the city’s police canine units. That was one of those weeks where I slept with a chair in front of the door.

So that brings us to this week in Batavia, Ohio – just outside Cincinnati. This week, we are sharing the Holiday Inn with a Scottish Terrier Convention. There are Scotties in the elevators, Scotties in the halls, Scotties in the parking lot and rooms and rooms of Scottish Terrier paraphernalia all around us, including Scotty pajamas, Scotty purses, Scotty mouse pads, and pretty much Scotty everything. OK, maybe this place has gone to the dogs, but at least it’s not the police canine unit that’s sniffing around looking for bad guys. Wearing golf shirts and logos on our sleeves, we’re just as much an oddity to the Scotty people as they are to us, but on an adventure like this, it’s a howl of a time.