My friend and former Sun London bureau chief Bill Glauber is touching base with America as the country prepares to inaugurate Obama. He's road tripping from Chicago to the National Mall, filing stories for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on the way. You want the REAL "Real America"? Glauber will find it, in small towns & large, among whites, browns and blacks. Here's the first installment. Read the whole thing here.

Chicago - The road to Barack Obama's inauguration begins here, in the big city on the prairie.

You swing by Grant Park, now snow-covered, where Obama claimed the presidency on a warm autumn night, electrifying hundreds of thousands of people who thronged the great lawns and softball fields.

You pass Federal Plaza, a sturdy, muscular space, where he gave a speech in 2002 at a small rally in opposition to war in Iraq, a speech that put him on the political map.

You glimpse Hyde Park, where Obama taught law amid the Gothic splendor of the University of Chicago and where he moved his family nearby into an elegant home opposite a Byzantine-style synagogue.

And then you head into Chicago's far south side, where it all began, in a neighborhood called Roseland.

This is where Obama landed in early 1985, a young community organizer fired by progressive dreams.

One week from today, Obama is to be sworn in as the 44th president of the United States.

So far away
There is an immense gulf between Roseland, where a predominantly African-American community struggles with an economy battered by the long-ago loss of manufacturing jobs, and the White House, the glittering center of international power.

Walk along the neighborhood's main shopping thoroughfare on S. Michigan Ave., a world away from Chicago's glorious "Magnificent Mile," and here is what you see: security guards outside clothing stores, a few restaurants, pharmacies, a bank, a barber shop, a wig shop, a photo studio, storefront churches and a furniture store with large mattresses standing near the entry.