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Juan loves driving the Pony.
Of the 2,300+ miles we drove, he allowed me to drive about 300. The man is a driving machine. We passed the time by listening to “The Social Animal” by David Brooks on audiobook.
The last time I drove from San Francisco to Chicago was with my older brother, when he was driving to New York to go back to school. In an exhibition of tag-team driving at its finest, my brother and I drove from San Francisco to Salt Lake City the first day, Salt Lake City to Denver the second, and Denver to Chicago the third in fourteen hours. We switched drivers every time we refueled. So, in my mind, leaving in the Pony on Sunday meant that we could make it to Chicago leisurely by Friday. I was wrong. We drove more than six hours every day except for Tuesday, the day that we spent a couple hours in the town of Green River, Wyoming, where a lovely municipal park on an island in the river provides a breezy, green napping grounds in the middle of the desert.
My favorite night was getting off I-80 between Rawlins and Laramie and traveling 130 through the Medicine Bow National Forest, where we camped for a night. On the way into the campsite, we saw two moose! I didn’t have time to grab my camera. We made quesadillas and slept to the sound of the river. Only 4 of the 20 spots were occupied. The camper next to us contained a sweet elderly couple and their dog escaping the Colorado wildfires.
jbuhler