mountain drive with a side of nature

Fifteen years ago I was 11 and the drive from Albuquerque toward Moriarty seemed like it took forEVER. Like bring a snack and a good joke book (Joke books! Classic 11 year old hobby.) because we're startin' the oregon trail, yeehaw type of trip. And this was before instant text messages and internet news updates every microsecond so I guess I'm saying kids have always had a problem with delayed gratification regardless of the current technology. Take that, Huffpo article about Kids These Days.

Needless to write, now that I have 3 to 5 gray hairs, the trip into the mountain feels like seconds.

I think the current technology at the time I was 11 was the encyclopedia on CDs my parents kept by their PC. If I wanted to look up cucumbers I'd have to find the "C CD" and put it into the CD drive and wait for it to pop up on screen and the little hourglass would flip over and over because things like that took actual minutes back then. Also, our email domains were either netscape or aol. I think my email was lilyofthevalley95@netscape.com. Or maybe lilyofthevalley95 was my password. Good password incidentally. Back then, using letters AND numbers in your password was very high level hacker. By the way, what were we using our emails for back then? Probably emailing our own family members who were living in the same house as us. Ha. Classic 90's internet.

Anyway.

We took a drive to the top of Sandia one Saturday this past summer. Here are the pics.

The scenic drive reminds me of John Denver album covers. And the 70's. It's probably not fair to the flora and fauna of the current wilderness. I can see their arguments now: 'heeeeey maaaaaan, just because nature became a "thing" in the 70's doesn't mean you can't give us a more up to date analogy.' You're right, nature. The drive up the mountain reminds me of the three wolf moon shirts I saw at the MEN show from last week. Owww-WOOOOOOOOOOoooooo!

This was all underwater 200 million years ago! Wouldn't it be cute if dinosaurs had blogs? And they would write their thoughts on the web. Like, actual webs. From spiders.

Albuquerque, presented to you by Bill Gates.

Something about this feels very World of Tomorrow even with the capris and REI hiking sandals.

On the way home the wind filled in our silences. We stopped for a quick minute to watch middle-aged retired hippies hike along a trail. They reminded me of John Denver album covers too.

Goodbye summer mountain day! See you next year.