I Must Hurry and Catch Up to Them, For I Am Their Leader

I started to write this Wednesday night. Things have been hectic here, to say the least, so the blog has been put on the back burner. I finally have a few spare minutes to finish it up, but don’t expect too much.

We arrived in Denver without incident, but not for the lack of trying. But was it really without incident? I guess it would depend upon how you define the word. Wiktionary defines it as "a designed, sudden, and unfortunate event", and I can promise you that most of what happened yesterday was not designed. Some of it, however, was sudden and some might even think, unfortunate.

The adventure began at 4:00 am on Wednesday morning, when I staggered crawled out of bed to shower and load the car for the trip to Denver. Despite having gone to bed just a few hours before, I was looking forward to the day because it meant that I would be spending time with two of my favorite people; my cousins Kay (who has just started a blog that you MUST check out) and Dale.

After numerous trips in and out of the house, the car was loaded and I was ready to go. It was 5:00 am. The plan (which had finally been revealed to me around 11 pm the night before) was for me to meet Kay, Dale and Dale's brother Danny in a town around 80 miles from home. From there we would "convoy" to Denver; Dale and Danny in one car and Kay and I in the other.

Since Kay and I been to Denver many times before and neither Danny or Dale had driven the route, it was decided that Kay and I would take the lead and the boys would follow. Danny would do the driving so that Dale could relax in anticipation of his upcoming bone marrow transplant.

Previous posts have made mention of the fact that I am Norwegian. This set of cousins are also Norwegian, and as I told a good friend a few days ago, Norwegians are notoriously directionally impaired. Leif Erickson was looking for the Spice Islands when he discovered America and the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree, at least not in this case.

We left Hardin and headed down I-90 toward Buffalo, WY. Kay and I had the music cranked and were talking and laughing. I checked the rear-view mirror frequently to be sure the cousins were behind us. We blazed by Sheridan and headed for Denver.

About an hour later, Kay announced that she needed to “rest”. I called Cousin Danny on the cell and arranged to take a short pit stop and gas up at Casper.

As we neared town, I said, out loud, “Are you sure this is Casper?” Kay assured me that it was. We missed the first couple of exits (don’t ask) and realized we were running out of “town”, so we pulled in to the last exit and headed back towards “Casper”. We fueled and grabbed some coffee and headed back toward the highway.

We hit the off-ramp and headed toward Denver. Or so we thought. The first highway sign we came to said “Moorcroft 15 miles”. Moorcroft I thought to myself. MOORCROFT? My mind reeled. I didn’t remember passing by Moorcroft on my way to Denver in August of ‘06. Was this a new city? Had it sprung up in the months since I’d last traveled to Denver? Obviously I was grasping at mental straws…

With my poor confused cousin Danny following behind, I took the next available exit and headed back the way we came. As we neared the city I spotted a sign that said “Welcome to Gillette”.

YIKES!

Somehow, about a hundred miles back, I had missed a Y in the road. Instead of being close to Colorado, we were actually nearly in South Dakota. For those of you not familiar with the geography of my part of the US…going from Montana to Denver through South Dakota is not a short cut. We were seriously off course.

Kay and Dale and I laughed hysterically, but to put it mildly, Cousin Danny was not amused.

To be continued…

And by the way, today is my one year blogversary. I'd have never imagined, just a year ago, that my little adventure in blogging would give me so much pleasure and introduce me to all of you. I feel truly blessed to be a part of this wonderful community.