Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2009 (Happy B-day Ashley!)
“Goodbye Ro-O-sey, the queen of Corona…” Paul Simon’s voice and jangly guitar echoed in the truck stop bathroom where I stood brushing my teeth at 5:30 in the morning. “Me and Julio” is one of Jenny’s all-time favorite songs; I decided that hearing it on the speakers at this Pilot station somewhere in Wyoming was a good sign. I took the wheel in the black night and headed east into the sunrise. Jenny slept in the back of the van. The sky went
indigo and pink on the horizon. I tried to snap a picture of a huge line of windmills stretching across those colors, but that’s no easy task at 85 mph. NPR broadcast forums about Obama’s upcoming health care speech and the day came alive around my windshield. Jenny took over the driving somewhere around Cheyenne, and three hours later, I woke up dazed and confused in Fort Collins, CO. There were still peppers hanging in my face.
An hour later we were parking the car on Pearl Street in Boulder. Clean-cut hippies were in the majority, but there were some crunchier hippies too, as well as some business-folk and tourist types like us. Just about everyone was smiling, and considering the perfect weather and the constant Rockies holding court on the horizon, I could see why. After getting a recommendation from our former first mate, Matt Stipe, we settled on Illegal Pete’s Burritos for lunch, where we split a Pork/Chipotle Ranch burrito that we agreed ranked in our top five all-time burritos. The key, as Stipe had told us, was Pete’s technique of mixing up all the burrito ingredients before rolling the tortilla. That way, all your bites are even; no more full bites of just rice, or just sour cream (is it just me, or does the sour cream always seem to go to the ass end of the burrito?). Then Pearl Street apparently took a closer look at us, smelled consumerism, and decided it wanted to squeeze some cash out of us. So I bought some duds at a vintage clothing store, tried to avoid going into a record store but of course could not, and when all was said and done, my wallet had definitely cut some weight. Jenny, the more thoughtful member of our dynamic duo, bought her usual barrage of postcards, as well as a few gifts for other folks. We took it easy at a coffee shop called the Laughing Goat for a little while, where we buzzed Larisa from CFFC in Cambridge; she gave us some much-needed technical support regarding our bliggity-blog here (many thanks, Larisa).
Then it was back on the road. Jenny took the helm as it was still light out and she doesn’t exactly thrive on night driving. I read Franny and Zooey by Salinger and decided that Zooey deserved a swift kick in the arse. Jenny ended up getting in the groove, and even after the sun went down, she stayed on the wheel and took us deep into Kansas. Soon after I took over, a 100-square-mile blanket of fog draped itself over the low hills and valleys of the plains. I could barely see the road. I gripped the wheel a bit tighter, leaning forward so as to better see the steady white tick of the broken centerline gliding into the hood of the van. As Jenny said, it was the type of road you saw in your dreams.
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