For those who only have time to read this blog and not the entire column, Nate was best friends with Joe Lusk, a Reedley High graduate. Nate was from Arizona. They met at West Point, and then went to the same flight school. Maybe the Army only has one flight school, I'm not sure. Afterward, they were both deployed to Iraq. A week after arriving in Kuwait, Joe was killed in a helicopter training crash. They had always talked about -- like so many of us sports fans do -- renting an RV for an entire fall and traveling to as many football games as possible.

This year, after two tours in Iraq, Nate decided to fulfill the road-trip dream to honor his friend and to raise money for Joe's memorial fund. The trip has a Web site and Nate is blogging along the way. It really is an absurd logistical undertaking, as I lamented in the column. Nate, along with his brother and another friend who are also on the trip, has already driven all night from Ohio to New England, from a Sunday noon game to make a Monday night game in Foxboro. And later in the journey, they will be driving from San Diego to Kansas City to Buffalo, and then back to Denver. They have a week between each of those games, but any one of those drives would exhaust you. I had to leave the San Diego-KC-Buffalo-Denver detail out of the column, unfortunately.

They are also stopping at as many college football games as possible, and so this weekend they are coming to the San Joaquin Valley to visit Joe's family and also going to the Fresno State vs. San Jose State game. At the end of the column I mentioned they had some mechanical problems with the RV this week in Santa Rosa and were not 100% sure they could make it to Fresno and still be back in Oakland for Sunday's Raiders-Eagles game. People have been emailing me all day to see how they can donate, if they can buy the guys a meal, just wondering if they're going to make it for the game. So I called Nate today (Friday) to get another update, and apparently they got the RV back from the repair shop, but were having even more problems. The check engine light came on and they think the RV was leaking oil somehow. So now it's even more unsure whether they're going to make it. Nate said they were working on it, and I told him I'd give him a call tomorrow to check on their status. (Check back for more updates.) There's just so much to the story, and luckily we have this handy blog to write endlessly.

That's the problem with writing about really interesting people with really good human-interest tales: There are always too many details. There just are. I rarely get to write more than 1,000 words, and not every tidbit and story is going to fit. It's like your grandparents' Christmas tree. By the time you're that old, you have hundreds of ornaments, way too many for one tree and if you put them all on it, it would fall over. You have to pick the best ones and just go with it. I don't know how other writers do it, but I tend to make a list of all my interesting details and try to weave the story through those. "Golden nuggets," some editors like to call them, the stuff that grabs a reader by the face and snarls, "Read this entire story right now."

Sometimes, I pick the wrong ones. Sometimes, I hope I get it right. Maybe there is no right. I'm just saying it's always a struggle not being able to tell you absolutely everything I know about a subject because I love the details. For instance, there is a tradition at Reedley High that a senior climbs the tower and plants a flag for the senior class. The school discourages that because, mostly because it's crazy and dangerous. The year before Joe's class, a guy got caught doing it and wasn't allowed to go through the graduation ceremony. They are serious about stopping it.

Well, after Joe's death, his mother Susan was going through all his old pictures and found one of Joe and a friend, dressed in all black, like movie burglars, and she came to realize it was Joe who had climbed the tower for his class, planted the flag and never got caught. They had even convinced one of the other moms to make the flag for them and she did, having no idea what it was for. Susan beams when she tells that story, and you can picture her sitting there that day staring at the photo and smiling. Now those are great details. You get mental images, personal details. You're connecting with the characters. You learn a lot about Joe, that he has some dare-devil in him, and a care-free spirit. (Susan thinks his entry to West Point could have been in jeopardy if he'd gotten caught. I don't know enough about the military to know if she's right, or if that is maybe an exaggeration.)

The one detail I had to get into the column, even though it was sort of a flashback, was the image of Nate getting off the plane in a peach tuxedo. That's so great. You know that moment when he was seeing Joe's family for the first time was going to be an emotional one, and here was Nate taking all the tension away by being silly and self-deprecating. It's a great scene and tells you a lot about how good of friend Nate was to Joe. And I can't help but picture the people sitting around Nate on the plane, smiling, pointing, wondering what he was up to in a "Dumb and Dumber" tux.

It's all just makes for a wonderful story, and I'm amazed almost every day by the human spirit, how people carry on through tragedy. I did phone interviews with both Susan and Nate, obviously, since she lives in Reedley and he was out on the road, and I just kept asking them questions that I knew would never make the column. I was just curious. I wondered if Susan is one of those parents who became anti-military after a son's death, or extremely pro-military. I'm generalizing, but it obviously has a profound affect on people's opinion of the war, and they seem to go one way or the other. She seems to be leaning toward the pro side, but pointed out that none of Joe's friends are still in the Army. Nate talked about the risks that go with being in the military, and just aviation in general. I hadn't really thought about that, that flying itself can be dangerous.

I could go on and on. What a trip. If you go to Nate's website and look through the itinerary, it's amazing what they've done already. The NFL games are one thing, but the college games they've seen are astounding too. Florida State-Miami. Florida-Tennessee. Notre Dame-Washington. Ohio State-USC. Wow. I mean, wow. What a trip. I can't say it enough. And they've seen Yellowstone National Park and Mount Rushmore and Fenway Park and some other natural wonders. OK, maybe Mount Rushmore was partially man-made. I'll have to research that.