We've had a number of cars that have gone off the road into the ditch. It's made travel very, very hazardous.

It doesn't matter how you travel it, it's the same road. It doesn't get any easier when you get bigger, it gets harder. And it will kill you if you let it.

Sometimes, you feel yourself weightless, thinned. You draw back the curtains (if there are any) on a rectangle of wasteland at dawn, and realise that you are cast adrift from everything that gave you identity. Thousands of miles from anyone who knows you, you have the illusion that your past is lighter, scarcely yours at all. Even your ties of love have been attenuated (the emergency satellite phone is in my rucksack and nobody calls). Dangerously, you may come to feel invulnerable.

The biggest cost is travel. You put a kid on the road for a day and it gets expensive, especially from Denver, because teams have to fly to competitions in the Midwest. Most of the rest of the teams can take buses.

I think the travel and being on the road so much the last three weeks finally caught up to us. The kids didn't have enough gas. We didn't have another gear to go to. We kind of ran out of magic here at the end.

This is a roadside attraction,' said Wednesday. 'One of the finest. Which means it is a place of power.