RoughRiders will travel about 1,500 miles this weekend

CEDAR RAPIDS - He's got more than enough tenure and stroke to be able to lay into the United States Hockey League for this one, but Mark Carlson won't.

At least publicly.

Carlson and his Cedar Rapids RoughRiders make their first road trip of the regular season this weekend, and it's a doozy. There are a couple other stronger and negative adjectives you could throw around, too.

The Riders have a rare Thursday night game at Fargo, then follow up with a game Friday night at Tri-City. That's in Kearney, Neb.

Mapquest.com says the mileage from Cedar Rapids to Fargo is 508 miles, a drive of about eight hours, give or take a few minutes. From Fargo to Kearney, it's 538 miles, or eight hours and 45 minutes, more or less.

Get used to that bus, boys, because you are going to be on it a ton.

'It's a tremendous challenge for us, and we'll welcome the challenge,” Carlson said. 'We will go get after it.”

The RoughRiders were expected to depart Cedar Rapids at noon Wednesday, so they'd get to Fargo and have a pretty good night's rest in their hotel rooms Wednesday night. But the back half of this roady is borderline insane.

The game at Fargo is set for 7:05 p.m. Thursday, so even in a perfect scenario, the team would leave Scheels Arena there between 10:15 and 10:30 p.m., with 538 miles to cover and a game Friday night that begins at 7:30, or 21 hours later.

Carlson didn't want to divulge the Riders' exact itinerary from Fargo to Kearney, but if they travel the entire way, they'd get to their hotel in Nebraska about 7:30 a.m. Friday, with a game in 12 hours. Even if they go only part way, like, say, to Sioux City, they'd theoretically get to their hotel around 3:30 a.m., get a little bit of sleep and head right back to the road for another four hours.

Win-win, right?

'It makes us feel more like pros, traveling all over the place like this,” said Riders forward Ross Colton. 'This is my second year in the league, so I'm kind of used to it. For the new guys, it'll be good to get in a road trip, have great times on the bus.”

'Personally, I'm excited,” added Riders forward Cal Burke. 'It's a great opportunity for the guys to get closer here at the beginning of the season. The long road trips are usually the most fun. It might not seem that way, looking in from the outside, but it's true. You get to hang with your teammates all the time.”

Certainly, this isn't as tortuous as it may have been 10 years ago or so. The Riders' bus is equipped with a satellite dish and DVD player, and cell phones and computers are obviously staples for guys.

But, again, to ask anyone to play a game one night and have to travel nine hours for a game the next night seems ridiculous. In professional baseball's Midwest League, for instance, the Cedar Rapids Kernels might make a seven, eight, or nine-hour trip somewhere, but have a day off to get there and another one upon their return home.

'It doesn't really matter to me,” said first-year defenseman Ben Foley. 'I've never really been part of a road trip like that. In high school, there are no real road trips. I don't know. It shouldn't be bad. Coach was saying today that if you are a good player, you are going to perform no matter what. There are four points available this weekend, and we just have to do what we can to get them.”

This is, by far, the most strenuous trip Cedar Rapids will take this season. There is a 10-hour beauty to Youngstown, Ohio, in middle February, but that's for two games, with a day between those games and the finale on a Sunday afternoon.

'Definitely Youngstown,” Colton said, when asked the worst trip he could remember from last season. 'On the way there it wasn't too bad, but on the way home, we ran into a snow storm. It took us, like, 15 hours to get home. I remember I was sick, I took some Nyquil and was gone the whole ride. I woke up, and we were back in C.R. The guys were like ‘Oh, that was brutal.'”

'I was ready to get off the bus,” Burke agreed. 'The worst thing was everyone got sick afterwards. One person had a cold or something, and it just spread throughout the bus.”

Carlson is in his 18th season with the RoughRiders and was asked if he could remember anything like this particular road trip. He paused for quite awhile before finally shaking his head.

He refused to expound.

'I'm just answering the question,” he said. 'You asked me if we'd ever done it, and my answer is no.”

Sometimes what isn't said speaks most loudly.

l Comments: (319) 398-8259; jeff.johnson@thegazette.com