Far to the west of Big Loins, Arkansas

West of Junction City, Kansas was blank. Ahead, there was a thin greenish-brown strip of prairie, and occasionally a low hill, but everywhere else there was sky.

Sparky had said she expected the plains to be boring. The plains are boring, but it's not the endless green and brown grasses that make the high prairie beautiful; it's the sky. Growing up in the Southeast, surrounded by glass and steel in the cities, and a sea of tall, dense trees in the country, I never saw this kind of sky. I remember I'd see descriptions of places like Montana and West Texas as "big sky country," and I don't think I really got what that meant. The sky encompasses everything in the western plains -- there's no trees or tall buildings to shrink it, and as you drive west, the horizon recedes farther and farther away, until you think you can see forever, across the dwindling barren line in front of you...

"Well," I said, as the Suzuki barreled up and to the west, "it's a hell of a lot better than Big Loins, Arkansas."

Sparky rolled her eyes. "Osceola."

"What?"

"The hotel we stayed at was in Osceola, Arkansas."

"Oh, right," I agreed amiably, staring at the sky. "I mean, it doesn't get much worse than Areola, Arkansas -- tiny, noisy room with obnoxious neighbors staying 10-to-a-room, broken wireless, floods, tornados, the only restaurant in town is a McDonald's..."

She smirked. "Pretty upset about that, hm?"

I-70 in west Kansas is flat, and completly, utterly straight. It reminded me of an old Bill Cosby joke that he figured it was ok to go to sleep while driving if the road was going straight, the car was going straight, so what could possibly go wrong? I-70 west makes you believe it. But it does climb -- Denver is a mile up, and by the time we'd passed through the city and started ascending into the Rockies, we checked on her GPS and noticed that we were well over 8,000 feet. On the map, there were three promising campsites on highway 40, past the tiny town of Empire. As we drove, the mountains we passed were wilder and taller, and draped with snow. It slowly dawned on us that, since the ground right next to the road had snow on it, we were going to be in for one cold night. The thermometer on the Suzuki read 39 degrees Fahrenheit, and falling rapidly. This alarmed me somewhat, as I have a 40 degrees minimum sleeping bag; anything below freezing would have been a long, painful night, even before factoring in the icy winds blasting through the passes.

I wasn't quite sure how to mention this. I mean...it should be simple, but Sparky's a tough-as-nails forester, with a remarkable ability to fall asleep in 10 seconds flat, and remain blissfully asleep through anything short of getting hit by a bolt of lightning. I'm not usually prone to stupid displays of machismo, but who wants to think he's a bigger wimp than his girlfriend, right?

Fortunately, she provided a neat exit from my self-imposed doom. "Don't you have a 40 degrees minimum sleeping bag?" she asked, gingerly.

"Um...yes."

"It's 39 out," she pointed out, "and dropping quickly."

"Yeah," I agreed, grinning. "This promises to be a fun night!"

"Why don't we go back and camp at lower altitude? It would be better if you didn't freeze to death."

I congratulated her on having such a wonderful idea, and wholeheartedly agreed. We wheeled the car around, and drove back to Denver. We downloaded directions to a campsite in south Denver over the internet, and, as is our custom, promptly got completely lost.

I frowned, my head swimming from the hundreds of miles we'd driven over the day. "Wait...were we supposed to get on highway 6, or 6th avenue?"

Sparky stared unhappily at my chicken-scratch directions. "I don't know," she grumbled. "My stomach hurts. This campsite is all the way across town. I'm incredibly out of it. Maybe we should just stay at a hotel tonight...?"

I wasn't too hard to convince, so we checked into a Days Inn, conveniently located next to a prison, which evidently has lousy enough security that all the highways are decorated with signs reading "DO NOT PICK UP HITCHHIKERS, STATE CORRECTIONAL FACILITY LOCATED NEARBY." In fact, I had a hunch that the scary-looking motel next door might actually be the state correctional facility...

I mentioned this to the desk workers at the Days Inn, who both responded with hearty agreements and slightly-too-amused laughs. Undeterred, we stumbled to our room, exhausted. C'mon...what could possibly go wrong with this plan?