T here are several immutable laws of the universe: conservation of mass, the speed of light, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principal . . . but perhaps the most important is this: “the enjoyment of a road trip is inversely proportional to the amount of planning beforehand.”
Need an example of this law in practice? While there are several, my 2003 trip to Colorado, for me, still stands as the benchmark.
In March of 2003 three friends and I sat in a tiny kitchen on Lilac street, off Corydon. We were talking about a pair of mutual friends who had been driving around the southern U.S. since September, living out of the back of their ancient Toyota Tercel wagon and climbing every rock they could find.
It was that night, in that kitchen, that we decided to drive the more-than 2,000 kilometres to meet them in Gunnison National Forrest, Colorado.
The extent of our planning included figuring out when our last university exams were, securing a car and checking Mapquest.com (this was in the pre-Google Maps days) for a rough set of directions.
Before sunrise, a couple of weeks later, four of us piled into a new Mazda Tribute — lent to us by a generous parent — with our loose collection of gear and started heading south.
While we were excited and optimistic, the weather that April was not kind. The pre-dawn road was slippery and sleet pounded the highway. It felt like ages before we saw the buildings of the Canadian/U.S. border appear over the horizon.
At this time of day the border was virtually deserted, just a few semi trailers were lined up. We approached the booth containing the U.S. customs agent with optimism. We were, after all, four university students simply going for an end-of-term trip; nothing suspicious there. The customs agent disagreed.
We were instructed to park the Mazda and were escorted into the suddenly ominous customs building. A particularly unfriendly agent with a conspicuously large gun strapped to his belt instructed each of us to empty our pockets onto the counter.
My heart started racing, not because I had anything untoward in my pockets, but because I suddenly realized that if one of my longhaired companions had stupidly decided to bring some Manitoba-grown across the border, we were all sunk.
Unsurprisingly nothing was found in our pockets and, despite the warnings given by friends back home, our cavities remained unsearched. We were free to go.
The next 22 hours in the car are generally a blur, but a few memories stand out, like the wrong turn in Nebraska (one of us forgot: Colorado right, Iowa left); the terror of realizing that we needed gas immediately, and were in the wrong part of Denver and seeing the sun rise over the Rockies on that second morning of the trip.
Soon we were on the outskirts of Crested Butte, Colorado, driving along a dirt road toward the place where our friends were illegally squatting in the National Forest.
The next three days were filled with rock climbing, bonfire stories about the wild times our friends had been having over the past eight months and freezing our asses off at night — none of us thought to check what the temperature dropped to at night in the Colorado Rockies before leaving Winnipeg. For the record, it is well below zero in early April, and our “three season” tents and sleeping bags were not up to the challenge.
After what felt like too little time we started to pack up to leave. Hugs were exchanged, and we once again piled into the Tribute, and drove out of the mountains. The trip home was quieter, with no sense of urgency; all that was waiting at home were shitty summer jobs and the monotony of city life. Had we been driving one of our own cars, and not been limited by our pathetic bank accounts, there is little doubt in my mind that we would have spent the summer of 2003 following that rusty Tercel from mountain range to mountain range, having the time of our lives.
