So A wolf in Taos Valley is up to about 11500 words. Not as much as I'd been getting per day, but the past week has been spring break, our daughter's high school band put together a trip for the kids, and we've been chaperoning the shindig. So, I brought the laptop along without much if any hope that I'd get anything put down on the story at all.

But joy of joys, I did. I'm not in Dean W. Smith's league by any means, but I'll take a few hundred words a day under the circumstances. I think we averaged about four or five hours a sleep per night over the trip. No one leaves a bunch of teenagers with time on their hands on a trip like that. For some reason they have a tendency to get in trouble if you do...

If you've got a few to spare, have some good thoughts for the family and friends of the Channelview High School and their bus drivers. They lost a tour bus in Alabama on their spring trip, one of the drivers died at the scene, and as I write this one of their band directors is in pretty bad shape. As it turns out, I think they were about an hour behind us coming back this way, so we found out about it on the road. Our bus driver knew both of the drivers involved in the accident, the bus industry is a pretty small family all together, and this sort of thing hits them hard.

Same thing with the Channelview kids. At that age, we put our kids out there on the roads for a lot of things, games, bands, heck I saw an AP Chemistry class at one of the parks we went to, enjoying their spring break. The feeling involved when all you see is a headline about kids and a bus crash... Our phones lit up like rockets, and I can promise, every single parent in the band was there waiting for us when we got home.

There were a few kids asking the question "Why on earth are they all out there like that?" Typically, it can take a bit for everybody to get organized and get the kids home, no delay today. So I had to explain to them a bit about what their parents must have felt yesterday morning watching the news, waking up and the first thing they hear on the news is "tour bus crash in Alabama, one dead at the scene" while their children were on the road through that area.

We got everyone home safe and sound from our little group, everyone had fun amidst the chaos of wrangling that many kids without losing anybody, they made some memories that will last a lifetime. Small blessings, the Channelview families got their kids back, as well. I just wish the driver's family could say the same, and that their band director's family weren't sitting in a hospital watching the clock tick.