With apologies for the interruption of service...

Wow, I was down yesterday. I am more optimistic, and hopeful today, and I fully well plan on ensuring that I enjoy this leg of the journey more than yesterdays. I'm not sure exactly what made it more miserable, but think it was probably entirely a matter of attitude. I was high strung, and to properly experience a journey like this one I think you must go at it from a place of acceptance. Yesterday i fought what came my way, and today I'll just allow it to happen. I have no plans for adventures, but if they come up I'll ride with it.So I'm at my first stop for the day, and what a difference a day can make. I've had a lovely morning. Colorado is beautiful. Even more majestic than I had imagined. The only thing I'll say on the subject is that it seems as though this place was designed as a reward for those who managed to successfully make it through Nebraska. The driving is slow going, the mountains are huge, and an eight percent downgrade is massively steep. I have no doubt my gas mileage is even worse in this terrain than it is normally. C'est la vie.

One thing I've noticed, and I'm aware that this is a superficial outsiders impression, but it seems that this place has no middle class, or at least has no visible place to store them. The only housing I've seen are trailers and hovels for the poor, and lodges and chateaus for the ultra-riche, and oddly enough it seems perfectly suited to the area.Well, I had an eventful afternoon and evening, after writing the first part of this post. I finished driving through Colorado, and it was magnificient, but shorter than I thought it would be. The biggest surprise of the trip so far has turned out to be how much i enjoyed driving through Utah. It was surprisingly beautiful, stark and unforgiving, open and empty, in places. It was a land of desert and mountains, and in the course of the afternoon I saw the sun, and the rain, and the snow. I loved every minute of it. I post just a few of my favorite pics, but you have to understand that photography has not, and won't be my primary concern on this trip.


It was while driving through Utah, that i had a revelation of sorts. As evening began to fall I saw a sign. An actual sign, thank you very much. It said that I was just over two hundred miles from Las Vegas, and I thought to myself that it would be really cool if I could make it that far, but realized from a practicality standpoint it just wouldn't work. That's when it happened. Connections in my brain re-jiggered themselves in a way that made it make sense.

Mindy's best friend Fern lives in Las Vegas. Mindy is totally supportive of this journey of mine, and will do anything she can to make it a better experience for me, of this I have no doubt, and sure enough, one brief phone call later, and I had a destination. There is nothing better to motivate oneself, I've found. I drove on into the night, not stopping, making my way through the rest of Utah, which I reluctantly said goodbye to. Into Arizona, and almost literally, ten minutes later out of Arizona into Nevada.

I don't think I really mentioned this earlier, maybe I touched on it, but I feel it's a salient fact, and okay to reiterate. I love the mountains, they are my biome of choice, generally speaking, but hiking, or observing them from a distance as things of beauty to appreciate, is very different from driving down them in a tottering, top-heavy van, as wide as a semi. So it came as a relief when I finished my final descent from Rockies, and into what i presume was the desert of Nevada, but having driven through it at eighty miles an hour in the dark, I couldn't say for sure.

It's true what they say; even from seventy-five or eighty miles away, you can see Vegas visibly lightening the sky, and it was a welcome sight, to say the least. When I began to descend into the valley, with all the lights stretched out as far as the eyes could see, it was like a triumph. It's odd how affecting the little victories can be. I might well have whooped aloud in the car, in sheer joy, over the brilliance of the day I had just experienced.

Many thank yous to Mark and Fern for allowing me to show up at their house, in the middle of the night; I mean it, it was really late, and for greeting me some warmly and welcoming-ly. They made me feel right at home, and they fed me, and beer-ed me, and made me up a room in which to rest my weary head. I am immeasurably grateful for their hospitality.

So here am I in Vegas, and I'm going to enjoy myself for a couple of hours before I get back on the road for the last leg of this part of the journey. La Jolla, here I come.