Raiders road trips. Griff had been there. Bedcheck at summer camp in Santa Rosa. Away game curfews. This should have reassured him about his experience with more than 40 players on a road trip.

However, all he could remember was away game hotel nights. Was it a season opening game in Cincinnati when half the offense slipped out after curfew bedcheck? We won the game, so no one noticed, he recalled. But how many times was morning practicing on away team fields a hangover blur? Did any students on the Huygens Team have experience in escaping hotels to go on pre-game binges? Some names came to mind.

In college, often student assistant coaches were assigned bed checks on curfew nights, but his student assistant coach was a woman. Robbie? Not that kind of responsible. Kekoa? His girlfriend was in Hawaii, but the location of his brother, the West Coast beer distributor was unknown. Durango? Was it proper to ask the President of the College to do bedchecks?

On the bus, Noah and Darnell were solving problems assigned in Professor Bond's Advanced Vector Calculus class. Gerry was writing a letter. Was it to one of the young Chinese women, who had been showing up recently at games? B2 was reading a mountain biking magazine. River was studying the game plan. Big Dog was reading the Bible. Damian was reading a comic book into which equations of motion were inserted. He had, Griff supposed, found it necessary to disguise his passion for physics. DeJuan was drinking from a thermos bottle. Checking on what was in DeJuan's thermos was not something he wanted to do. Griff also had a thermos bottle that he himself had packed, and it did not contain plain coffee. But, he was now a Head Coach, not a young man in his twenties. He sighed.

The buses had exited the highway and were in the Rogue River Valley. Few bars and no strip clubs were visible, only miles and miles of stunningly beautiful landscape. Isolated trout streams. Rivers running fast through deep canyons. Fog dusting distant mountains, waterfalls plunging from cliffs into deep pools. Vineyards, meadows, farmhouses. Small beaches on rivers, rubber rafts, coolers presumably full of beer. Caydance had never been to the Rogue River Valley. If there was a next time, Griff hoped that she would come with him.