Russ Ringsak drives the 48-foot trailer for the set of A Prairie Home Companion, starring Garrison Keillor. Here are his musings on the last leg of the show's spring tour:

We were back on the road in February and March, our annual cold-weather tour, spreading the good word about the excitement of icy roads and drifting snow back home and what a boon it is to enjoy the bitter winds and freezing rains up there. We spend about a month every winter in the balmier latitudes, telling folks how much better off they'd be if they were up north, and of course how much we miss it ourselves.

I am beginning this bit of horse-pucky Ð the column that is Ð sitting in the driver's seat, listening to the sounds of the crew behind me pack up the gear, readying it to be rolled on board. The truck is at the broad stage dock of the Cricket Pavilion in Phoenix, where we did an outdoor show. It's Saturday night, the 22nd of February, the windows are down and I'm wearing a short-sleeved shirt. In Minnesota right now the temperature is about 12 degrees and no doubt people are leaning into it with their elbows held close to their sides, clutching scarves around their necks and looking down at the sidewalk for icy patches as they leave restaurants and theaters.

The rig lurches as the cases roll on. Some weigh over 600 pounds. The dock is at exactly the right height here and they roll straight in, first the four house carriages, then the big four-foot-wide wardrobe-sized steel closets full of speakers, microphone stands and bases, amplifiers and cable. The large and heavy go in first, followed by the medium and difficult and ending with the small and easily overlooked. All are secured with load beams and locks, so that when you open the back doors you are not buried under tons of beat-up road gear.

This trip began on February the 11th, the morning starting out with a sunny sky and deteriorating into snowfall by noon. We left the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul into an uncertain Wisconsin, nature looming between us and Nashville. The snowpack began to build on the road around Black River Falls. Being raised above the natural paving by one inch of ice lowers the humor level by about ten feet, but there were very few incidents Ð just after crossing the Illinois border the snow went away and it was an easy cruise after that. Down I-39, sleep in the truck, hit I-74 over to I-57, south to I-24 and on into the City of Pickers.

I took in the Country Music Hall of Fame and what a great surprise; you see it just off Broadway near the new downtown hockey arena, big and grey and serious, a great curved granite wall with a heavy glass lobby leaning into it, and it looks more like a celebration of lawyers than country musicians. But they play a trick on you with the courthouse appearance of the place. The floors of displays are wonderful and I'm not throwing that word around lightly. If you've ever had an affection for country music, even if you've fallen away from it now, you will be moved. As you leave you see the quote from Harlan Howard on the wall: "Country music is three chords and the truth."

The drive to Phoenix the next morning started with a cushioned cruise on I-40 through the green damp hills of west Tennessee, raining lightly most of the way into Memphis. Drove through downtown hoping to find a place to park the rig so I could get some ribs at the Blues City Cafe on Beale Street, but the town was so full of Sunday traffic I gave up and headed west across that amazing truncated parabolic steel bridge into Arkansas.

Interstate 40 across Arkansas is a lot like I-94 across North Dakota; a permanent construction project. It's construction acting like a farm subsidy, in that it is both seasonal and never-ending. I have never driven across either state in the last 25 years without hitting long construction zones. Across Oklahoma the soil gets red and the vegetation has to get tough to deal with it. Across the Texas panhandle a lot of the vegetation just says forget it, although you see trees along the creek beds and off on the horizon.

We stopped in Amarillo for a steak at the Big Texan and I do recommend it. The exterior looks a little over the top, all bright yellow and blue, but inside it is a big old dance hall with a balcony all around and long tables and a lot of carved wood high-back chairs and an open kitchen with big ranges with flames prancing. In front of the kitchen, out there on the dance floor, there is a low stage whereupon hopeful cowboys can take the 72-ounce steak challenge: if you eat the whole four-and-a-half pounds in an hour, including the side dishes, you get it free. If you don't, you pay for it. The waitress says about 8 or 10 guys try it every day. I was happy to settle for a one-pound ribeye and it was real good and there's truck parking out back.

Before you get to New Mexico the billboards begin and once across the line you get the full treatment, more signs than a protest march, but with better graphics and without the hollering. You see big gaudy billboards for outposts advertising fireworks, moccasins, Indian jewelry, banana splits, Black Hills gold, sunglasses, wind chimes, hand-carved Kachina dolls, rattlesnake souvenirs, t-shirts, original Nemadji pottery, burgers, shakes, beer, ice, leather clothes, hats, jade, agates, onyx, native silver. On a rising plain a sign invites you to "Visit the Continental Divide," at a place where it's not the high mountain pass you might have expected. A lot of RVs and trailer houses on the flat land near the Divide; something about the ambiguity of the place just draws them there.

Vegetation gets thicker, changing from sage brush to cedars and burr oak, and the land rises and by the time you reach Flagstaff you are 2000 feet higher than mile-high Denver, and you catch the beautiful I-17 southbound through the pine forest, the beautiful jagged mountains, the long views across amazing valleys of solid deep evergreens. Road signs tell each thousand feet of elevation lost: 7000, 6000, on down to below 3000. The names are more direct and less lyrical than in New Mexico: Bloody Basin Road, Dry Beaver Creek, Toozigut, Big Buck Creek, Montezuma's Well, Bumble Bee, New River, Moore's Gulch. The organ-pipe saguaro cactus begin right at the gulch, and suddenly they are numerous and interspersed with smaller cacti, prickly pear and the little barrels and such. Remarkable that they begin so abruptly, just 40 miles north of the city.

If Phoenix is laid out on old cattle trails, like most places, free range cattle probably always walked directly north and south, single-file, in straight lines exactly a mile apart. Nobody knows why they would do that, but the trails all had names, like Camelback, Indian School, McDowell; Central, Hayden and Scottsdale. Our hotel has a couple of clues that this isn't like most places, because there's no B on the elevator and no Weather Channel on the TV. No basements here and not enough weather to sponsor a full-time program about it.

In this great one-story metropolis there are some taller buildings, those who found bedrock, and here a building of ten stories really looks like something; you can see it for miles. And there is an actual downtown with even taller structures, all clustered among tall palm trees, very lush, very pleasant, possibly the shadiest downtown in America. Downtown seems to be here not as an afterthought but simply because a proper city, especially one of 3 million citizens, necessarily has a downtown. Even if 95 percent of the residents never go there.

You don't see your towering dramatic knife-edge glass statements clawing at the sky here: the mission style has been applied very broadly in Phoenix, and it's an easy style to live with. It's all restraint, simplicity, muted colors and subtle elegance in the details. And it suits itself to updating; there is a modern mission style biker bar over there in Scottsdale, surrounding an outdoor courtyard, and none of the patrons seemed mindful of the presence of irony.

But I wasn't there in search of irony anyway; I was just thirsty.