Several years ago I decided to change up the vertical blinds in our bedroom for some shades and curtains.  I had seen some curtains at Target that I thought I would like to have. The hubster was working full time traveling to Chicago two hours there and two hours back home and said he was unable to help me put up the blinds.

I don’t remember how I found this young man to do the job for me.  He said he was an assistant coach at Dakota High School and so I figured he must be a trustworthy individual.  We set a date and he came over and he inspected the windows.

After some time he figured out how to install the blinds and got them up in no time at all.

I asked him how much I owed him, and he told me that his mom had passed away just a short time ago.  He had promised her that he would “pay it forward” as often as he could.  He didn’t charge me anything and wouldn’t accept a tip.

I was so grateful but I couldn’t ask him to install the curtain rods for me for fear he wouldn’t charge me and I’d feel guilty as hell.

I hired a service to install the curtain rods.

I have never forgotten that young man and his kindness.

Recently, I was a at grocery story on a Sunday buying a few things I needed.  I was behind a very well-dressed black couple that had obviously just come from church.  Behind me was another black man.  The man behind nudged the man in front and jokingly said, “Hey, how about buying mine too?”  The man in front laughed and turned away.

When I checked out I grabbed the man’s chicken that was behind me.  I told the clerk that I’d like to purchase this gentleman’s chicken.  I gave him a wink.  I felt so good for the rest of the day.

I’ve often wondered if the guy that I bought the chicken for, told anyone what happened to him that day.  I should have reminded him to “pay it forward.”

And the absolute ultimate pay it forward of them all – be an organ donor.

Peace be with you.

The best trip I ever took had to have been when the hubster and I took off two weeks from work and headed out west. We drove to Denver non-stop in 17 hours.

There was next to nothing as far as gas stations and once we barely coasted into the station near Lymon, Colorado.  We ran out of gas when we turned off the key.

We saw the Rocky Mountains quite a while before we got to them.  We were too excited not to go into the mountains, even though we were severely tired.  I had on a bikini bra and levis.  I got out to make a snowball which I threw at the hubster.

Coming down out of the mountains we noticed that there were pull offs with heavy duty iron rails.  We figured these were for those folks whose breaks decided to quit working.

Since we were so tired we decided that we would stay in a hotel that night and get a good night’s sleep.  The next morning we were off on our way through Colorado.  We noticed three types of climate.  The first flat and empty, the next the mountains and their third was desert like.  I really liked Colorado.

I believe our first stop was Arches National Park in Utah.  It was lovely with orange rocks and rock bridges.  We had borrowed a friend’s camera and I took lots of pictures.  We were going to camp, but our tent kept falling.  We realized that we needed special tent stakes for sandy areas.

The next day we proceeded through Utah to Zion but it was closed due to snow.  The same for Bryce Canyon.  I was severely disappointed as I had heard both were very beautiful.  We drove on to the north entrance to the Grand Canyon.  The cars coming out had two inches of snow on the tops.  The entrance was closed due to snow also.

We made the decision to drive around the east end of Grand Canyon, determined to see the Canyon.  We had no idea of the time involved.  It took forever to get to the south entrance.  As we drove through the magnificent desert we saw various stands where Native Americans had put up to display and sell their hand-crafted items.  We didn’t stop because we felt we would buy stuff just to buy stuff and we would rather see the Canyon.

When we were on the road we would stop for coffee at various cafes.  We kept noticing that they were floating stuff on the coffee.  We started calling it “minnows in our coffee”.

We finally made it to the Grand Canyon.  We walked to the rim and I started crying.  It was so completely overwhelming and beautiful, and I couldn’t stand it, I just had to cry from the beauty of it.  We took tons of pictures and marveled at all of the various foreign languages we heard from the tourists around us.

That evening we went on a night tour.  We sat at the brim of the Bright Angel Fault in a circle and the ranger gave us a background of the Canyon and told us various stories concerning the Canyon.  We had a campfire going and we were very quiet and listening to the sounds of the Canyon at night. It was quite a spiritual event.

We stayed at a desert view campsite and it was cold the next morning, I awoke on top of Rick.  I was so cold!  We joked about that for quite some time.  The next night a tremendous storm arose.  The Canyon looked even more beautiful with the overclouded skies.  We were afraid our tent would collapse but it held up nicely.

Our next adventure was Las Vegas.  Our friends, Kay and Charlie Watkins, had invited us to stay with them in Vegas.  I was not so taken with Sin City.  It was very pretty at night all lit up and splendid.  However, we saw a woman in her housecoat, curlers in her hair and house slippers, with a child tugging at her coattails.  She was at a slot machine and not paying any attention to the child.  It made me sick to my stomach.

We had a wonderful time with Kay and Charlie.  We went hiking in the Fire Canyon and I will never forgot the beauty of the dessert and the mountains.  We slept in a new waterbed that Charlie has just build.  A new experience for me.

We went into town one evening and saw BB King in concert.  A highlight of the trip for me.  We saw people betting thousands of dollars at a time and it just made me ill.  Thinking of all the good that could be done with that money and it was being pissed away as if it was nothing.  I will never go back to Sin City!

As much as I hated to leave our friends, we continue on our excursion.  We headed to the Teton Mountains.  We stopped at the lookout at the Three Breast Crest and took pictures.  Rick had been looking for a place to try his hand at fly fishing and he found a little stream and we stopped for a while.  He had fun casting but that was all he did.  No trout bites for him.

We stayed at Jenny Lake Campground and met a couple of folks and had a beer with them.  The guys decided they were going to fish.  We headed off to a small lake nearby.  They discovered they had no bait and it was decided I would drive back to camp and get some bait.  I didn’t realize it was over sixty miles from where we had camped.  Time goes by fast when you’re having a good time.

Anyhow, I got back to the campground and there was this moose there.  I got the bait and headed back to the lake.  I was so excited about the moose and said I wish they’d hurry up, so we could go back and they could see the moose.  After fishing, we headed back and sure enough, the stupid moose was still there and eating everything green in sight.

Our next stop was Yellowstone.  I was so excited because we were going to camp there.  The campsite was a canopy of pine trees.  The ground was covered with pine needles and the soil quite sandy.  The trees lower limbs had been cut to about twenty feet above our heads so you could see all over the campsite.

I discovered the most beautiful painting.  In a knothole of one of the pine trees someone had painted a picture of a little cabin in the forest with smoke coming out the chimney.  It was so very special, and I was honored to have witnessed this splendid work of art.

That night we heard the bears trying to break into various garbage cans.  They have these huge cans and the tops screw on so the bears can’t get into them.  They warn you highly not to leave any food out and to pick up any major crumbs.  It was kind of scary when we heard them that night, but we made it through alive.

We saw Old Faithful, other geysers, and the hot springs and all the wonderful sights.  I was appalled at the litter I spotted in the beautiful mud flats.  There were wooden walkways and you were not supposed to stray from them.  You could feel the heat from the Earth and the smell of phosphorus was intense.  Again, we were surrounded by tourist from all over the world.  I was sort of proud that this tremendous park was in my native country.

We drove and drove.  We were getting on each other’s nerves by this time.  We would stop and get some more of the coffee with minnows.  We stayed in hotels at times or if possible, set up our tent and spend a night or two camping.

I was totally impressed with Dayton, Wyoming.  It was lush green mountains with red earth.  You could see the red contrasting with the green grass here and there.  It was lovely, and I could have stayed there but it was a little nothing village.  I don’t think we even got coffee with minnows there.

The Big Horn Mountains were not what we had anticipated.  We were driving our brand-new Lincoln Mercury Capri.  It was a four-cylinder and not a very powerful vehicle.  We had made it so far, but the Big Horns were going to tax this vehicle alarmingly.  We had been tailgated by semis and bigger vehicles.  Once on the way down a huge mountain, we had a semi about ten feet behind us all the way.  It was very scary!

As we topped the Big Horn Mountains, holding our breath the entire time, the view was awesome!  Behind there were unbelievably huge mountains and in front of us spread the vast prairie.  It was like a massive drop off.  Here mountains, there, flat as far as the eye could see.

We started across the Badlands and began seeing signs for the Passion Play starring Joseph Meier, famous Jesus impersonator!  The guy was like five feet tall, chubby, and was a famous Jesus impersonator.  Years later, I discovered that one of my friends, Toni Bortoli, was from the same town in Dakota and had been in the famous Passion Play.

Another thing we kept seeing were signs telling us to “See Rock City” and to visit “Wall Drug”.  We laughed and joked that we had to go to Wall Drug to see if they had any good ones.  Sick puppies that we were.  We wondered if Rock City was really made entirely of rocks.

I think we did stop at Wall Drug and it turned out to be one of those places that sells ashtrays and dirty post cards.  I think we got some coffee with minnows.

We stayed at a really cheap hotel during this part of our journey.  They had a curtain covering the entrance to the bathroom and pelace smelled of mold.  They also had posters in the room for the Passion Play, starring Joseph Meier, famous Jesus impersonator!  We lived through the room and didn’t get bugs or crabs, thank goodness!

It seemed the Badlands took forever and there wasn’t much to look at.  I believe Rick and I were on our worst nerve ever at this point in time.  It was night when we came into Mount Rushmore.  It was so startling!  Darkness, but the mountain was lit with huge spotlights.  I was entranced.  I am so glad we saw it at night because it would never had had the same effect in the daytime.

We drove on.  I believe we stayed overnight in a clean, not moldy smelling hotel and continued on our way the next day.  We came into Wisconsin and it had been raining for quite some time.  The sun broke free from the clouds and a huge rainbow appeared before us.  And then another appeared above it.  I got out the camera and hung out the window just as another rainbow appeared.  I got a photo of a triple rainbow in Wisconsin.  I have always loved that state and it was welcoming us back to civilization.

We ended our trip with a visit with Rick’s parents in Rockford, IL.  It was a trip of a lifetime.  Amazingly, we didn’t kill each other or divorce.  And we didn’t choke on all the darn minnows in the coffee.  I still have no idea why they coffee had all that junk it it, and why everyone’s coffee had minnows in it.

The sad part about the trip was that we had borrowed a camera and most of our ten or so rolls of film were ruined.  I guess we didn’t understand how to operate the camera.  We got one shot of Rick and me in front of a waterfall in Yellowstone, a wonderful shot of the Three Breast Crest, a photo of the little painting in the knothole, one photo of the magnificent moose and a few others.  We had enough to make a slide tray to show our friends.

It was a wonderful trip and I will never forget it.

Peace be with you.

P.S.  The photo is not one of mine but about the same as I took of the Three Breast Crest in the Grand Tetons.