Rich on the Road

Somewhere North of Amarillo in either Colorado or Oklahoma

David and I are on the move, with the prospect of spending this entire Friday just trying to keep our Dodge Durango between the ditches. It gives me lots of time to ponder.

I get statistics each day on how many individual users view this modest attempt at blogging and it looks like several hundred of you have been following the sporadic posts over the last two days. I think it may give you a good idea of what it takes to produce a TV news feature. It reminds me of a saying that's popular in the Army -- "Hurry up! And, wait." We've done a lot of hurrying up and waiting. Thursday we spent 11 hours driving -- from 9am to 8pm Dallas time -- before we finally caught a big dramatic super cell. And, then, David had to scramble like mad to get the video he needed before the sun went down. The resulting feature, I hope, will be action-packed and exciting to watch. The process of producing it was most often painfully slow.

I penned a comment in the last blog Friday about how the"elite" on the east and west coasts largely view those of us in the middle as "fly-over country." Or, as one of my brothers is fond of saying, "just a bunch of beer-drinking Jesus freaks from fly-over country." I don't drink much beer these days but I'll cop to being a Jesus freak. And, this really would be alien country to someone who has spent their entire existence in Manhattan. I grew up in a tiny town not unlike several we've driven through over the last two days. I would not want to go back. I'd go stir crazy without the amenities I now enjoy in suburbia. But, I know also, that for someone who enjoys rural life the insanity of the city would make them miserable. I love New York but living there would be a challenge. God has blessed me with a great job in a big TV market (6th largest now) that suits me just fine -- and allows me regular opportunities to get out and see the wide open spaces.

I'm just a little sick of seeing them right now.

Rich