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MASON CITY, Iowa - Eight-year-old Ben Navratil came to hear Mitt Romney speak today, and he wasn't going to leave before he had his question answered.

"Is it hard running for the president?" Ben asked, wearing a "Romney for President" sticker across his small forehead.

Before answering the boy's answer, Romney couldn't resist asking him about his sticker choice. "I see you have a sticker on your forehead. You know that's got my name on it?" the front-runner GOP presidential candidate asked

The boy said that he did, and waited patiently for Romney's answer. "That's a darn good question and the answer is 'yes' and 'no.' It sounds like a politician, I apologize," Romney said. "The answer is it's hard in terms of getting up early in the morning, sleeping in a strange bed almost every night, one hotel after the other. We were in a Hampton Inn last night and I don't know where we are tonight.

"Different hotel in different nights, and sometimes you don't sleep so well," Romney explained, before launching into a story about truck drivers who kept him up all night in Muscatine, Iowa, when they saw his campaign bus parked right off the interstate.

"Every now and then the drivers liked me, and would pull the horn so we had trouble sleeping. There are times it's hard," Romney said. "But the best part of the campaign is doing what I'm doing now. It's meeting people across the country and shaking hands and making friends.

"The measure of a person's life is not how much stuff they have … [it's how] many people they love, how many friends they have. It's the personal connections between people, family and friends that really measure what kind of life you'll enjoy," Romney said. "So getting to run for president has been the greatest opportunity I've ever had to expand the world of my friendships and people I love and care for.

"So, if you get the chance to do it, make sure you do it," he told the boy. "Win or lose, it's a great thing to do."