A late night moonlit walk in the dark by myself. On the trail down to the river, I can just barely make out a bicyclist at the side of the trail, working on a rear wheel by the light of a dim headlamp. I scuffled my feet on the sidewalk as I approached so I wouldn’t startle the person, stopped and made a sympathetic comment about having to work on a wheel in the dark. The bicycle rider burst into tears. She had crashed ten miles back and hurt her back. She was just trying to get home and the rear wheel came off as she was pedaling up the steep hill. She had just broken up with her boyfriend and thought a ride through Glenwood Canyon would be a good idea but she got caught out in the dark. She had just given up getting home on her own and called a friend to come pick her up at a nearby highway rest stop.
There was nothing I could do to help so I listened. I walked her up the trail to the highway rest stop and listened some more. I didn’t feel good about leaving her there alone in the dark so, with her permission, I stayed and visited with her until help arrived. She wondered why I was in the vicinity and I told her about our life on the road. She reminisced about traveling the country in a VW Bus and I described the VW busses we’d had over the years: the 1966, 1972, and 1978 busses, culminating in the giant VW bus we drive today, big flat steering wheel in the front, engine roaring in the back; we just have a little more space between the two now. The real rescuers came and took her away. I finished my walk. When I got back Judy observed how long I had been gone and I got to tell her “I met a girl”.
Yesterday, at our lunch stop on top of Vail Pass, a tour bus unloaded thirty-three tourists in our vicinity. They milled about, took a few pictures of the scenery, then migrated toward our coach. I ended up visiting for quite a while with the guys outside about the mechanics of the motorhome and tow car. All from Norway, some of them spoke English that I could understand and translated my answers to the remainder. While I was outside, Judy had begun giving tours inside. We opened up the slides so they could get the full effect. They had never seen anything like this in Norway. We didn’t get all thirty in the coach at once, but we got to share our story with an audience fascinated by its novelty to them. The tour bus left before we did, with waves from inside the windows all along our side.
An interesting accumulation of events: our life on the road.
