The answer is quite simple and I have a 611 mile journey and a boy that I used to know to thank for it.
In early January of 2013, I accepted the friend request of a young man I knew from the "land of long ago and far, far away". His name was Mike and I remembered him from the fact that he used to run cross country back in the same high school in Kansas that I attended in the early 1970's. You could say that I barely knew him, only of him. Now out of the blue, we were connected to one another through social media.
It didn't take long before I made the first journey out to meet him once again and spend some time in his part of the world, the San Juan Mountains of Colorado. That trip was kind of crazy and it went against every safety rule that there was ever written, but I went regardless. If my folks had been alive, I'd have been grounded forever. After school was out on a Friday, I hopped in my car and headed on Highway 50 from my home in Hutchinson, Kansas. I'd never been to that part of Colorado before but Mike assured me that all I had to do was to get onto 50 and head straight west.
He was right. That's all I had to do.
611 miles due west.
There's much more to the story than what I can explain here but trust me, the journey was one that opened my eyes to many things, the greatest of which said it was an unsafe decision on my part. If you know western Kansas at all, then you will realize how the first 4 hours of this 11 hour saga were pretty much boring. That's not speaking poorly against that part of the state because a good many people live there who are my dear friends. But the truth is, there's not much. Even eastern Colorado will give you that same sense of nothingness, just one little town after the other.
It's by the time that you hit the city of Pueblo, Colorado and make that westerly turn towards Canon City and the mountains, that the real drive begins. My part of the trip that dead of winter evening began in earnest about 10 p.m., long after I normally would have even been awake. I continued to drive pushing on towards the city of Salida before finally choosing to stop at midnight to try and rest a bit.
I slept until 4:30 and found myself awake again and on the road one more time. I wasn't far from Mike's home now and I wanted to get there soon. In the early morning darkness I took out and headed for Monarch Mountain and the more than 11,000' pass that I would need to cross over. As I made my way up and over on a very snow covered and icy road in the dark of winter, I knew that I probably shouldn't have tried it.
It was too late to turn back now.
I led the procession of two from the bottom of the ascent to the mountain. It was just me and the road grader guy following a car with Kansas plates a safe distance from behind. He probably wondered what crazy person could have possibly been out that early in the morning on a cold and freezing winter's day.
It was me.
I made it without trouble and settled in for a nice weekend of getting reacquainted and seeing sights that I had never witnessed in my life before. They were sights like the ones shown below.
Cerro Summit at sunrise on a winter's morning~
The most beautiful view in the world near Ridgeway, Colorado~
The top of Monarch Mountain~
Or the ice climbers at Ouray~
I knew that first trek out to a place as foreign to me as any country in the world was probably going to send big change to my life. I had this feeling that I was being led by the good Lord to do other things. The 57-year old Kansas schoolteacher, the one who had lived all of her life in the same county and nearly the same town, needed to move on to other things and surely to other new places.
It was my time to get a "view from a different window".
Two years ago Mike and I left Colorado. It was the right moment to do it but of course, a little unsettling to just wander off into the unknown. We didn't know where we were going and had zero prospects for jobs. We had no home picked out. All we knew was that we were not going to remain in the mountains. Our "new view" has taken us out of the Colorado high country and down to the Great Plains of Texas. Here we have found many more sights to see, perhaps none yet as beautiful as the majesty of the mountains, but beautiful nonetheless.
Everything that happened to me since that first moment of reconnecting with a young man I once I knew of has happened because of a great plan. There were children in Colorado, Texas, and now Oklahoma who needed me to come and be their teacher. They just didn't realize it at the time.
Neither did I.
Looking back, it might have been easier to just stick it out and finish up life where I had known of it for well over half of a century. After all, I had grown quite comfortable with it. Yet an even greater plan was being laid out for me, one that would take me to fine schools in Colorado, Texas, and now Oklahoma.
It was a plan to spend life with someone who was looking for someone just like me.
Now nearly 4 years later, we are here.
Alive and well in northern Texas.
God has been so good to me.
And it all started out with a journey of 611 miles.
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