I had only just recently purchased a car, and I had never driven for any real length of time... certainly not for the length of time I was about to attempt, and most certainly not with a five month old. It was never ideal; after all, not very many pilgrimages end with a viking funeral on your moving day, but a situation had arisen where my small, growing family had found it impossible to stay in Sacramento, and then California.

THE DELAY

The trip started on August 10th, 2010, around 7 pm, PCT. My Aunt Denise, whom had let me stay at her home for nearly three weeks, had made me a lovely dinner of mashed potatoes and meatloaf, and the epicness of the quality of this food is more than I could possibly hope to describe in words. I had finished packing, save for hanging my bike rack on my car and loading that up, but we had been saving it for last. It was, after all, impossible to open the trunk on my '94 Taurus GL with it on.

So we went down in to the storage room of the apartment complex - of which she is the manager - and to my dismay, my brand new, $40 bike rack had been stolen.

We spent the next several hours trying to find a store that was open that could possibly carry a replacement. We finally found our replacement in a Walmart near Carson, and with yet another $50 invested in to my lovely pink beach cruiser, I filled my gas tank, washed my windows, and said my farewells to my aunt that had quiet nearly been my mother. I have always felt especially close to Denise, and her to me. When I was a baby, she had even tried to adopt me when my mother abandoned me in Lodi to go... somewhere. I am still not sure where she spent those months. We both tried very hard not to cry, but it was impossible for me. I was starting a new life, in a new City, in a new state, halfway across the United States. I thought to myself "Yeah. This is how they must have felt when they started out on the Oregon Trail... that they were leaving everything behind, all for the chance at a new, better square one."

CALIFORNIA

My fiance, CartMaster Chris had already gone out to Colorado several weeks prior, and had gotten us a lovely two bedroom apartment, and he got it for only $400 a month! This was it, I told myself. This was our chance to make a brighter future for our daughter. So I lifted my chin, took off my shoes, and began my race to meet the sun in Denver.

The drive through California was unmemorable. The only thing that I did of any consequence was cry, and curse that the exit that google maps had given me was under construction, so I was forced to trail blaze my own path, as detours are obviously NOT something that Los Angelos County is very interested in funding. Once I hit the desert though, the trip got interesting.

NEVADA

My first real stop of the night was a treat to myself: Las Vegas. I hadn't ever been, and I was on a time schedule, but I still managed to work in a few minutes to take a long slow drive down the strip. What an unusual contrast, I thought, to the stars shining in the desert, being held at bay by this neon replacements. Equally lovely, but something utterly unclassy about it. Like Diamonds and Glass, the similarities were easy to spot, but one could never, EVER be confused for the other. Satisfied with my detour, I got back on the road.

ARIZONA

I saw no less than 9 shooting stars on my short trip through Nevada and Arizona, and at one point, the night sky was so beautiful I pulled over to the side of the road and nearly wept. Oh, THIS was the things that poets wrote about! This was a beauty and majesty that gave our societies celebrities their nickname of 'stars!' The sky was littered with those shining lights against a back drop of black satin, like diamonds in a jewelery store case. I finally got back in to the car, content to be the Delphin(Dolphin) of Dionysus to the sky's Amphitrite.

UTAH

My next major stop was in Utah, to appreciate the beauty of Virgin River's Gorge. Or, more literally, to appreciate my own humanity, because that trip was filled with twists and turns, very little barricades, and it was dark as death and impossible to see where you were going. I trusted my car, my little white Taurus, to get me through the desert and wilderness and back to the love of my life, and my car provided.

I stopped again in Utah, only to realize that, halfway through the trip, my debit card was missing! I was able to go nearly 250 miles on a single tank of gas, and I had pushed even THAT to the limit traveling through Fish Lake National Park in Utah, where there is over 100 miles of nothing but forests and curves and rock formations. I tore my car apart, sobbingly. Everything that I owned was in my car, and if I couldn't get it to Colorado, then I truly would have to start over from scratch.

The Salt Lake Sheriff's department was of very real help to me though. As it turned out, Utah sets aside a large portion of their budget to help young mothers like myself through whatever problems they might have - and one of those was gas to get cross country. It is a very sexiest law, as my fiance, had he been in my position, would have not met with such any easy fate as I did. Still, I was grateful, and the Sheriff filled my tank and I headed in to Grand Junction, Colorado, to pull cash out of an ATM and cancel my card.

COLORADO

At this point, even though I hadn't been driving that long, I had been up for over 36 straight hours. It wasn't that my body was demanding sleep, it was that my eyes - which, due to likely diabetes, tend to not work as well as they should anyways - were exhausted, and were unable to process much of anything. From Grand Junction to the beginning of the Rockies, I called Chris, in an attempt to keep me focused for the last 3 hours of the drive. After a while, though, our daughter began to cry, and I had to hang up to focus on her.

The last thing I remembered was telling Chris I loved him.

THE END OF A LIFE

I woke up in a parking lot nearly 50 miles from there, with absolutely no recollection of how I got there. Teagan was still crying, and I was fairly shaken up. I have a tendency to sleep walk... had I driven almost 50 miles in my sleep!? With my newborn DAUGHTER in the car!? On the treacherous curves of the Rocky mountains, of which was completely and totally foreign to me?!

I have no idea. I called Chris, shaking and crying, and asked him how long it had been. I lost almost an hour of my life, and I have no idea where it went to, or why. All I knew was that I was thanking every deity that would have me that both my daughter and I were fine.

For now.

I made it to a golf course in Vale, 94 miles from my destination, when my poor old Taurus lurched and jettisoned oil from under the hood. I immediately pulled to the side of the road, and my car gave a long, last rattling breath before it died on me, in the middle of a mountain range, with no one I knew for nearly 100 miles, in a thunder storm.

My phone had only 1 bar of power left, and I called my fiance, who got my father and his two friends, Eric and Tyler, to come out with him to pick me, our daughter, and all of my belongings up. I also called the Sheriff, who sent someone over to push me further away from the freeway and associate me with the Colorado laws on towing and abandoning cars. I bought my Taurus for $800. We put $400 worth of work in to it. It got me from Sacramento to Los Angelos, and then helped me to build a foundation for my future, and then it got me to Colorado.

When Chris' friend Tyler, who is a car fanatic, came, he was impressed by the car. The damage that had been done had been by a previous owner, who had dismantled everything and rebuilt it. The car had blown a head gasket, as well as a bolt that had gotten lodged somewhere near the dip stick, and after trying for a few minutes to start the car, we realized just how lucky I actually was, when the rod began to blow. Had I been driving, and making a turn on the mountain, it is something that could have turned very, very dangerous for my daughter and I.

We loaded our belongings in to my father's Scion Xterra and Eric's Oldsmobile Caddi. They fit, barely, and then we began to dismantle the car.

It would have cost over a grand just to tow it through the mountains... more than the car's value. So we left it to rust - after, of course, causing some mayhem and being generally a bit to violent with tupperware containers and the car on a whole. I was tempted to shatter a window myself, but I refrained out of respect for the car, which had, against all odds, gotten me much, much further than it should have. I was - am - extremely grateful to that car. It got me to my new home, safe and sound. I also thank God that I am a stubborn little chit, who had chosen the shorter route through the more dangerous Rockies rather than the longer route through the desert. Had I broken down out there, it would have been entirely possible that I wouldn't have been seen for days.

Our two bedroom is lovely, and it came furnished. We are on the top floor, and have a gorgeous view of the Rockies, looming less than twenty miles away. We are walking distance to a National Park, Beer Sisters I believe it is called, and all in all, there is very little I could ask for.