Road Trip
I went on a business trip to New Mexico a couple of weeks ago and decided to drive down so Michelle and Grant could come. They stayed with her sister while I worked and then we took a little road trip on the way home.
We visited the Great Sand Dunes which was awesome (in a non-valley girl kind of way), except for the the wind which picked up a layer of sugar-fine sand and blasted the skin off of our ankles.
We drove through Durango, Ouray, and Silverton on our way home. These are all tiny old mining towns that are often unreachable in the winter due to road conditions. The designers of these insane mountain roads knew that the only thing that could keep you from careening off of them and plummeting to your death was fear. So, to magnify this life saving terror they disposed of such things as guard rails and straight-aways. They also removed the emergency lane so that the only options were "road" or "cliff". I literally could not see the road if I looked out the passenger side window. Looking down all I saw were hundreds of cars piled up at the bottom of the chasm where the shoulder of the road would normally be.
To be honest I never looked down, but I have no doubt that is what I would have seen had I not been leaning nearly into the drivers seat with my eyes shut and my hands clamped over them. I tried to tell Michelle I was just napping, but I think the sweating and whimpering gave me away.
It was a great trip and only took a couple of days at work to recover from it.