Rocky Mountain National Park

In July 1997, my former in-laws decided they wanted their grandkids to come out to Colorado for a visit. Nick and Val flew out of the Minneapolis airport July 12 and the following week, Himey and I drove out to get them.

We left on a Friday afternoon, planning to pick up the kids at their grandparents sometime Sunday afternoon. Having made this trip many times before, I told Himey ahead of time that there just wasn’t much in Iowa, Nebraska or eastern Colorado. Somehow, he still managed to enjoy it.

Being as we spent Saturday night in Fort Morgan, Colorado, we knew we had a good portion of the day to waste before picking up the kids. We drove through Estes Park and the beautiful Rocky Mountain National Park, then down to Castle Rock where I showed Himey the house I used to live in. I even took him to Daniel’s Park to get a great view of the castle on the Cherokee Ranch just west of Castle Rock. Since I had been there last, some developer had built an elaborate golf course on the land between the park and the castle, so he was more fascinated by that.

For it being our first long trip together, we were doing really well, no disparities at all, until we got into Colorado Springs. Having been there before, I had decided that I would drive, thinking I knew where I was going. I know that Himey will roll over, laughing hysterically, when he reads this, but I am without a doubt, the first to admit when I am lost.

“Honey,” I said, “Can you reach into the backseat, get out the map and tell me where we are and how to get to the hotel from here?”

“I don’t do maps,” he answered casually, making no move whatsoever for the backseat.

“What do you mean you don’t do maps?”

“I mean I don’t do maps.”

I felt my blood pressure rise, as I continued to navigate the unfamiliar streets, obviously on my own.

“What do mean you don’t do maps?” I asked yet again.

“I mean I don’t DO them.”

“Is this a personal conviction you have that I was not aware of? Or what? We are lost and I need you to read the map and tell me where we are.”

He read off the name of the street sign which we just passed and said that that was where we were.

Was he just trying to make me homicidal? Was he just being stupid? What was his problem? Just get out the stupid map!

About that time, I had a blackout. Oh, I kept driving and somehow we found the hotel, but I don’t remember how we got there. I just kept seeing black spots in front of my eyes. You know the ones I am talking about. The ones caused by an overload of anger spilling out all around your eye sockets.

Pike's Peak, I believe from our hotel in Colorado Springs

(Taken from the first page of the notebook that I kept of this trip)

What: Summer Vacation
When: July 18 thru 25
Where: Colorado and South Dakota
How: Driving my car many hot miles
Why: Because we like to go bumming
Thoughts prior to the trip:
Nick’s (age eleven: I may have seen the Black Hills, but there’s always something different to see. I can’t wait to see Grandma and Grandpa.
Val’s (age seven): I think it’s going to look cool out there.

Himey’s: Our first real family vacation. I hope we all have as much fun as I hope to. I’m looking forward to seeing land I’ve never seen before and doing it with the people I love.
Chris’s: I can’t wait to just get away from home and travel. It’s been a long time since I was out West and I’m anxious to how things have changed and how much I remember of the things that have stayed the same.

This is the first vacation where I turned anal about documentation. Tomorrow I will tell you how many miles we drove each day; how much money we spent each day on food, gas, hotels, etc.; and what time we did everything. Not only what actually happened, but also the estimates I calculated before we left home. Can’t you just wait?

I’m just kidding. I’ll try to make the trip more exciting than that.

Go to work in the morning
and stick to it until evening without watching the clock.
You never know from moment to moment
How your work will turn out in the end.
Ecclesiastes 11:6 (The Message)

Twice a year we go through this. Early in the evening, my husband sets most of the clocks in the house, either forward or backward, and I spend the rest of the night not knowing what time it is. I wake up in the morning still not knowing. Because I always change the clock next to my side of the bed last.

It is November, so we set the clocks back and then people say we gain an hour. Gain an hour? How does that work? I can never figure it out. Just because I can stay in bed an extra hour and it turns out to be the time I normally get up, it doesn’t mean that I really gained an hour. To me, that says we have time travel.

I do obsess about time way too much to the point that I drive myself nuts sometimes.

When I was in Africa, we learned the following saying. “Americans have clocks, Kenyans have time.”

Wow! How I wish I could throw away all the clocks and just have time! The problem is that I have so much to do every day that I feel I have to continually time myself so that I can get it all done. But you know what? The work will still be there tomorrow. Or maybe the work just wasn’t that important in the first place.

What is important is getting my priorities straight. All this “stuff” that I think I need to do? It really doesn’t matter in the end. What matters is that I take time every day to work on my relationship with that Lord. Because that will matter in the end.

Maybe Germans are even more obsessed with time than us Americans. Or Val, when she was in Germany two years ago, was just obsessed with taking a picture of every clock tower she saw.

I am going to skip all the touristy, “we did this and then we did this” tales of our trip to Las Vegas in 1997, and just tell you about the city bus driver.

After Hoover Dam, Fremont Street is probably the next most popular must-see place in Las Vegas. It is where the original casinos were located and where the huge neon cowboy sign, an icon of Vegas, resides. In 1994, four blocks of Fremont Street were enclosed with a gigantic neon-light canopy. Throughout the night, the light displays change to the beat of the music. Himey insisted we had to go downtown to see it.

Not realizing how big Vegas is, we tried convincing him that we should walk. On the map, it only looked like Fremont Street was nine or ten blocks from the Excalibur, on the far end of the Strip. Himey, the seasoned Vegas veteran that he is, assured us that we would want to take motorized transportation. So, we hopped a bus.

Big mistake.

The bus was crowded and smelly, but we seemed to be approaching our destination post-haste. Then, at one stop, someone touched the rearview mirror.

No big deal, you and I would say. Keep driving, bus driver, you can still see what’s behind you, nobody moved the mirror, they only touched it.

Well, no. The bus driver announced that she would have to call her boss and that she would hold us hostage until she spoke to him. We don’t know what the boss had to say, but at the end of the conversation, the bus driver once again made an announcement.

“I can’t drive this bus no further ‘til someone from my company comes down to adjust my mirror.”

Himey, Pat, Jeff, Amy and I all looked at each other and said, “what?” Then we looked at all the other passengers, and they were saying, “what?” as well.

Realizing we were ready to mutiny, the bus driver let us off the bus. “But I ain’t goin’ give you no refunds if you get off and ya’ll will have to pay to get back on.”

Like there was any way in the world we would get back on her bus.

Fremont Street was now only a couple blocks away and we walked there in just a few minutes. The light show in the canopy was worth it. And the taxi cab ride back to the hotel was well worth the cost.

We rented a car one day and drove out to Hoover Dam, because, well, no one goes to Las Vegas without seeing the Dam.

At that time, there were several different tours to take. Pat and Jeff, being electricians at our paper mill, were tempted to take the "get into the guts of the technical stuff” tour but it was an all-day expedition and rather pricey. So they opted to join Himey, Amy and me on the cheap, quickie tour. A few years later, Jeff went back and took the technical tour and really liked it. Since September 11, 2001, I believe they no longer offer that outing.

While there, we had to take pictures of all of us at various points on the dam with various scenic backgrounds. Jeff and his daughter walked across the road so we could snap their picture. Pat and I hooted – they walked identically, the same lope in their stride, swing to their arms.

Himey next sent Pat and me across the road. When we got there and turned around, he was practically falling over the wall into the river he was in such hysterics.

“What is the matter with you?” I hollered over to him.

“Nothing,” he choked, trying to catch his breath.

After he had snapped the shots, he too walked to the other side.

“What was that all about?” I demanded.

“You and Pat are so funny. You mocked Amy and Jeff for walking the same, but you two sisters walk exactly the same too.”

We looked at each other. “No, we don’t.”

Jeff and Amy looked at each other. “We don’t walk the same either.”

Himey just shrugged. He realized he was outnumbered.



Jeff, Pat, Me and Himey inside the Luxor hotel

The most uncharacteristic thing that Pat ever came up with was that we should go to Las Vegas. My sister Pat who hated big cities, who hated commercialism, who hated crowds, who was not fond of shopping or gambling or watching people do stupid things. Where did she get the idea that we should go to Las Vegas? Because she had heard that Las Vegas has fantastic and inexpensive buffets and her husband Jeff lived for a good cheap buffet.

So we booked flights out of dinky little Rhinelander airport. Himey and I got out to sin city on the evening of May 3, while Pat, Jeff and Jeff’s daughter Amy followed the next day.

My internal clock is always set to go off way earlier in the morning than it needs to. And if you send me an hour west, my clock is even more screwed up. Usually I can wake up in the wee hours of the morning and lay quietly in bed until it is time to get up.

But no, the morning of May 4, as the clock read 3:30am, I sprung out of bed.

“Himey, I can’t lay here any longer. I have to get up and go explore.”

We were in the city that never sleeps, right? Of course, he obliged and we slowly started getting ready for the day. I think the sun was just coming over the horizon when we burst out the front door of the Excalibur to discover all the cities within the city that Las Vegas has to offer.

Cold can't always be measured by a thermometer. It may say ten degrees above or thirty degrees below, and the cold can still be other-worldly cold. Cold like the dark side of the moon.
Cold like Black River Harbor that February day in the winter of 1997 when Pat and I decided that it would be fun to see some of our favorite waterfalls when they were engulfed in snow and ice.

The Lake of the Falls, near Mercer, was our first stop. The flowage was covered in snow and ice thick enough to hold not only the two of us, but four-wheel drives and ice shacks. We struggled through the snow to get closer to where we believed the falls to be, but stopped when we heard the sound of rushing water. The water of the meager falls still had enough power to force through the snow. Hmm? we thought as we stood panting a mere foot from the open water, and then we wisely tromped back to solid ground.

The falls at Black River Harbor were more of the same, except that our trek through the snow was much longer and followed a rabbit path instead of the boardwalk which led tourists to this spot in the summer. We were pretty much alone, not even any rabbits out that day.

We continued our drive and came out on Lake Superior. Up until that point the air outside felt like the chill of any other winter day. The sun was shining, and felt warm when we turned our faces to it. But we had been raised on Wisconsin winters and as long as the thermometer stayed above zero Fahrenheit, we didn't think it was too bad.

When we got to Lake Superior, however, it was as if all heat was sucked out of the universe. It wasn't just the cold and it wasn't even the wind because there was none. The air was still; there was no movement in the sky above or the ground below. No birds were flying and there was no noise whatsoever. It was like walking into a vacuum.

I thought that Gitche Gumee was powerful in the summer, when the waves crash on the shore, unrelenting in their actions. The power to just withdraw heat, movement, the very air above was a power I could barely fathom. The Lake was covered in snow, with drifts like waves upon the beach, and as far as you could see it was one solid whiteness, the sky blending into the horizon.

"Wow," Pat said, "not quite what I expected."

"I know. It’s like being on another planet. It’s beyond cold.”

We took our pictures and fled back to the SUV. And then hunted up a place in Bessemer which was open and served hot chocolate.