The 47th race to the White House has just passed its first formal milepost, last week's Iowa delegate-selection caucuses. Yet TIME'S campaign correspondents feel as if they have already endured as many bad meals, standard stump speeches, lost luggage and bumpy flights as most Americans do in a lifetime. In the process of reporting for this week's Nation and Press stories on the Iowa balloting and its implications, our "boys on the bus" paused to assess life on the campaign trail. Among their impressions so far:

National Political Correspondent John Stacks began covering the campaign of 1980 in September 1979. Despite that lead time, he frets, "I may not be able to travel with all the candidates before they cease to be candidates." He caught one with little time to spare, Republican Senator Larry Pressler of South Dakota. Says Stacks: "I managed to finish reporting a story on his hopeless and misguided presidential candidacy only two weeks before he dropped out." If some candidates are misguided, observes Midwest Bureau Chief Benjamin Gate, others are astonishingly absentminded. Gate escorted Republican Candidate John Anderson to a TIME editors' lunch in New York City. "Anderson rushed into the lobby of the Time-Life Building looking a mite perturbed," he recalls. "He came up to me and asked for $10, explaining, 'My bags are in the cab outside, and the driver is holding them be cause I don't have any money.' " Says Cate: "I lent the Congress man ten bucks, which was repaid by an aide."

Like many candidate followers, Correspondent Doug Brew, our man with George Bush, has become a connoisseur of campaign airplanes. "They can be a measure of the candidate's progress," he explains. Before Iowa, Brew observes, "Bush was flying commercial airlines with only a few reporters along. Now the press corps numbers up to 20, so Bush has rented a comfortable 28-seat plane." Edward Kennedy, on the other " hand, took off from the Senate floor with a retinue of 60 journalists and a chartered 727. "On the day of the Iowa loss, the jet was grounded for lack of funds," reports Correspondent Walter Isaacson. "Our final meal on board had been shrimp and broiled lobster. From now on it's buses and peanut butter sandwiches." Senior Correspondent Laurence Barrett, who follows Ronald Reagan and his team, might not mind an occasional grounding. When a spectator at a New Hampshire rally last week asked Barrett where he was from, the New York-based correspondent blurted, without pausing to reflect, "I live on a plane."

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