Jill's Journal: Road trips, late-night serenades and The Lynx Way

I have to admit that I was looking forward to last week’s West River road trip to capture the Lady Lynx competing for a state championship, capping off their memorable and record-setting 23-1 season.

I cheered. I beamed with pride. I hugged and high-fived players, coaches and fans, as if I’d actually played the game myself.

And that’s what an experience like this is all about. Camaraderie. Community. One family. The Lynx Way. All wrapped into one.

But as exciting as it is taking it all in from the sidelines, comes hours and hours of downtime in between games. I do my best to use that time wisely. For starters, there are hours and hours of pictures to be gone through, cropped, lightened and sometimes sharpened. And there are emails that need to be answered, phone interviews to conduct, stories to be written, pages to be designed, and the list goes on.

With the Lady Lynx assigned to the first game of the tournament at 11 a.m. MT, my alarm rang off at 4:30 a.m. CT Thursday and I was steering the Buick west by 6 a.m. Following the game, lunch was next on the agenda, followed by an early check-in at the hotel, checking emails, going through photos from the game and so on.

As the day wore on, my good friend Wilma and I were excited for Thursday night’s lineup of TV shows that gave us reason to “stay in” and relax, which is exactly what we did.

After turning out the lights about 11 p.m. MT, I had little trouble drifting off to sleep, only to be awakened by some chatter right outside the door. The “party in the hallway” initially sounded to be short-lived, or so I thought. Within moments, I heard someone singing right outside the door. A girl wants to be serenaded, but at 1:15 a.m., there’s no tune that would make any gal’s heart swoon.

The unexpected “concert” in the hallway was enough to get this gal out of bed and opening the door to the hallway. Half expecting a party of people calling it a night after a few – maybe more than a few adult beverages – I was surprised to find a teen-aged boy sitting right outside the door, Facetiming someone somewhere, singing along with the source of the music.

“You need to take your concert elsewhere,” I told him, probably scaring the dickens out of him in my less-than-appealing-you-just-woke-me-up-from-a-deep-sleep persona. 

The young man was apologetic, and if he’s not the track team, he should be, because he bolted out of there like a greased pig on the run at a Fourth of July party.

The next day, I caught a ride in the elevator with three young men, and within seconds of the doors closing, I asked if they were in Rapid City for the state basketball tournament. Turns out, they were not.

“We’re broke college kids from the Minneapolis area, so we came here for spring break,” one of them answered.

I learned they’d been just across the border to Devil’s Tower, and of course, all the big highlights of the Black Hills – Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse, The Badlands, Deadwood, and more.

As the elevator doors opened, I wished them well and told them they had picked a pretty good place to spend their spring break.

And as I walked away, I couldn’t help but smile.

For us, the trip west was about basketball – about cheering on a team that has given our community so much to be proud of.

For that hallway crooner, it might have been about a late-night song to someone miles away.

And for those college kids, it was about seeing the Black Hills for the first time.

Different reasons. Different journeys. Yet for a few days we were all part of the same West River story – sharing the same hallways, the same elevators and the same stretch of South Dakota road.

Trips like that have a funny way of reminding you that while we may all be headed in different directions, the memories we make along the way have a way of connecting us just the same.

And if nothing else, they also remind a person to pack earplugs.