Day One

We are about to eat greasy biscuits and eggs at a diner in Des Moines before we hit the highway, curling east from this city through miles of cornfields and big blue sky.

Yesterday, my friend Sarah and I drove west from Madison, WI, to Des Moines to see an old friend. Today we backtrack, heading east for a three-day drive to Vermont. But before we leave Iowa, we have a beauty queen to track down.

Some back story: Sarah wants to go to a radio conference in Chicago later this year. They're paying the airfare and waiving the conference fees for the person who submits the best three-minute audio piece inspired by one of the following subjects: a package of mouse traps, a bike horn, or the quote, "Well-behaved women rarely make history."

We were brainstorming ideas while we drove yesterday, somewhere in eastern Iowa, when we missed a turn. We didn't realizing it right away, so we had to navigate some very small roads that cut through even smaller towns, to get back to the highway.

One of those small towns was a town called Elwood. And at the entrance to Elwood stood a sign facing the main road that said, "Welcome to Elwood! Home of Darcy Benton, Miss Iowa 1986."

And we thought, well, Darcy Benton apparently made history (at least in Elwood) -- wonder if she's well-behaved?

So today, we're retracing our steps to find Darcy Benton.