Those people who list "traveling" as one of their life's passions would have loved to be a member of the Penn State baseball team this season.

Louisiana, North Carolina, Florida, South Carolina, Arizona and Minnesota have all been stops during what has been a 25-game road season.

But for those who identify as a player or coach, the fast food, hotel rooms, buses and planes associated with travellimg across the Country take their toll.

"You're excited for the first two weeks then after a while it gets old," shortstop Scott Gaffney said.

"You get a lot more stress worrying about school, leaving Thursday and missing Thursday and Friday classes."

So is the tale of a Northern baseball school. But at 3 p.m. today, the long and winding road trip ends when the Nittany Lions host Iowa in the first game of a four-game series at Beaver Field.

"For seven or eight weeks we've been on the bus right about now," Penn State head coach Robbie Wine said during batting practice yesterday.

"Getting ready to load, packing up, saying goodbye to everybody and hitting the road."

The Lions (7-18, 2-2 Big Ten) are coming off a 7-4 extra-innings win Wednesday night against Pittsburgh and a split with Minnesota last weekend, and are looking forward to spending a weekend in State College for the first time since mid-February.

"You're always eating fast food and stuff, living in the hotels. You're not getting as probably as much sleep as you should," right fielder Brian Ernst said. "This home series is huge for us. Just getting a little home field advantage, getting our home fans here is going to be nice."

The Hawkeyes (11-12, 1-3) come to Penn State after losing Wednesday to Illinois State and dropping three of four to Ohio State last weekend.

Last season, when the Lions played the Hawkeyes on the road, Iowa won three of those four meetings.

"They clicked on every cylinder. They could bunt a ball and it would hit a rock and go fair. They could do anything they wanted.

Meanwhile, we could do nothing right," Gaffney said. "Hopefully [this weekend], we'll take three out of four at least."

Alan Stidfole (1-1, 3.67) will start today's game with Mark Wyner (2-4, 5.80) taking the hill for the first game of a doubleheader at 1 p.m. tomorrow. Aaron Markowitz (1-3, 4.55) and Craig Clark (0-5, 5.93) will get starts in the second game of the doubleheader and Sunday's 10 a.m. game, though who will start which game has yet to be decided.

"Sometimes you get into the series and things change a little bit with matchups and what you want done so we're just going to wait," Wine said.

Wine also said that players who have seen limited action recently, like outfielder Travis Laird and catcher Aaron Greenfield, will see more playing time.

"We're going to start to match up some guys," Wine said. "Not so much platooning but keeping guys sharp for the whole weekend, so Sunday we come out strong, too."

As far as playing at home, strangely enough, it may take some time for the Lions to settle into a home-weekend routine and get used to the sight of playing a game at Beaver Field, which the Lions only started using for outdoor practices last week.

"It's going to be different for us," Wine said. "It's going to be nice though."