I know it took me forever to post this but suspense is everything in this biz.

So where were we? Oh yeah, middle o’ nowhere Colorado with no car, no money, and the flu. If this doesn’t sound familiar read this and this. We spent the night at a certifiably sketchy motel in Limon, Colorado. I remember very little of Limon except that it is pronounced like “lime-in” and you can buy Frisbees shaped like cow-pies. In fact, the rest of the trip from here on out is a little hazy. I remember horrifying a slick Subaru dealer by dry-heaving into a bush behind a 40,000 dollar car. I remember a short, dumpy salesman named Ray who walked with an awkward foot-thrusting gait. Ray offered to take us to a nearby dealership to look at a magenta minivan, but Macky would have to drive because Ray’s license had been revoked, he wasn’t sure why but it might have something to do with that time he got two speeding tickets in one day. I remember Mike, a friend of a friend, who offered to look over any car we considered buying and who, more notably, looked like the Hulk if the Hulk wore shorts and polo shirts. I remember ordering tacos at a shady Mexican dive and napping in the Jeep. It was not the best day ever, but somehow, and I put this down to Macky’s indomitable optimism and the tacos, it wasn’t the worst day either.

Through some combination of luck, fate and desperation, we found a car. It was a little orange Chevy and Macky fell hard the moment he found out it was stickshift. The price was right, which is to say Macky could buy it and still hope to eat again in a few months. Things were starting to look up. Naturally, the car wasn’t ready to drive off the lot yet—-that would have been too easy. That sort of thing only happens to other people, people who don’t have a bad-luck-logistics demon lurking in their luggage. We had passed the point of optimism and were beginning to accept that nothing was going to work out easily on this trip. Macky put down a $1500 deposit on the new car and we got back into the Jeep and drove to New Mexico. Sometimes you just need green chile burritos and hikes in the mountains.

(and yes, we are aware that that is a lot of beer.)

They say the best adventures happen when you least expect them, when everything, absolutely everything, has gone wrong. This is a well-worn travel cliché, but it’s true. They also say that adventures are not all that fun while you’re having them, and this is also true. No one wants to spend three days sleeping in the lobby of a car repair shop in Independence, Missouri. And no wants to sell their car for parts halfway through a road-trip. But a funny thing happened on this trip. We still had fun. Not all the time, of course. There was a fair amount of crying and cursing and bemoaning life. But we kept ourselves entertained with stupid games and we did jumping jacks in parking lots. We met a lot of really nice people we never would have encountered otherwise. When you drive 12 hour days and sleep in hotels you miss the Rays and Noels and Robs of the world. And when you fly you miss it all–the sketchy Mexican restaurants with no front doors, the open plains, the setting sun in your eyes. These things are worth seeing and these people are worth meeting. And if it takes everything going wrong to make you stop and see something new, maybe it’s all worth it. And when it’s over, when you’ve had a few months to catch up on sleep and overload on Emergen-C, it starts seeming like a pretty good time.

That said, I wish you all better road-trip luck.