Sweetie and I were married in the flower of our youth. I was a junior at USC and she had already begun her vocation as a nurse, or how I paid for the books in my senior year. One year after our we were married our daughter was born and I carried her to school with me. I went to work the week after I graduated and Sweetie was already working. We did that for 40 years and we built something.
We had accumulated and we had saved. We had raised and we had educated, and now suddenly we were headed down the road with no destination and no mandate to have one. We started saying things like "we can be homeless anywhere" within the first hour of an aimless drive.
Moon is the most comfortable car I've ever owned. I told her how tall and heavy I was and she adjusted my seats for perfect ergonomics. She recognizes I'm coming and fixes the chair for me, which massages at regular intervals. I turned into the captain of the starship Moon and learned how to monitor her systems. At a gas station, I absent-mindedly thought, "4 corners, yeah, that's the ticket. That will be fun," and opened what I thought was Bing and asked it about directions to the 4 corners from where I was. It kicked out a full itinerary, complete with how to park and a seamless transition to Moon's navigation. So we went.
We arrived, and it was mostly empty. All the displays, every amenity of the site, was ours to enjoy; we then ran around it and did so. On the way back to the car, a wind hit my back. It was the wind of a feeling best described by getting to go on Senior Ditch Day when your parents say you can go.
We stood at the corners of four states and picked the
one we thought would be the most interesting we'd never gone to, and picked Colorado. When I got back to the car, I opened the window and asked it for a cool resort town in driving distance. It said Telluride, but there's this town not too far named Ouray. It was about 3 p.m., and I put Ouray in the navigation, put Moon on the highway, and said, "Mr. Sulu, all ahead warp 3."
As we left the desert and began to ascend the mountains, I noticed, unusual for me, things heading up the hill. There were these gates that looked like they meant, unless you want a Donner Party experience, you should stop here, but they were open, and it was March, so we drove on into the night. After a while, Moon started relaying messages to me about how the roads were icy and she was adjusting her footing.
Night fell, and the two bad kids ditching school pushed up the mountain when something odd happened on Moon's navigation display. The road before me looked like someone had thrown a plate of spaghetti instead of roads, and at the same time, it began to snow. The automation that had kept Moon bisecting the lane perfectly between the lines checked out and said, "you're on your own, bruh." Within five miles, 5 mph was my speed limit, and I couldn't even see what was on the other sides of the roads, but I did see there were no *^%$#ing guardrails.
I went to the center line as if it were life itself. I put Moon directly over it, and as I couldn't see more than about 10 feet, I knew that line wasn't going over the edge. Sweetie said if she smelled nervous, she was getting out. I'm glad she couldn't smell it, but if you had placed a lump of charcoal in my bum, I would have squeezed a diamond for the next few hours as I went through switchbacks that made me question the sanity of the Colorado highway engineers.
Moon never wavered, and when big rigs came through, I eventually gathered the nerve and skill to let them by without, I think, too much profanity from their drivers. We went through 2 tunnels and around one last noodle, and there was an alpine village—my navigation telling me to make some lefts and rights that wouldn't lead to an inky abyss—which led to a Best Western Sweetie identified. Taking the bags to the room, I could really hear water moving, and I thought how well I would sleep that night.
My substitute clock still runs, and I woke up before the birds organized to tell anyone and walked out my door. I have been to the mountains in S. Cal. I used to go skiing in Wrightwood. I have been to Big Bear; I have been to Tahoe, and I was not ready for the real. I could not believe the idyllic, perfect American mountain town I'd fallen in. I ran around the lot of the Best Western, and in all 360 degrees was beauty beyond sublime; it had a brother singing John Denver and "Rocky Mountain High."
We spent a couple of nights in Ouray. We learned its You-Ray, I learned that road was called the Million Dollar Highway and that going down it unknowingly at night in a snowfall is an interesting choice for a dude from S. Cal. We dined we played and we say Ouray from one end of it to the other, we walked it's not that large. I also decided there was no way I was going back the way we came, so we went.
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