A first date

I asked a girl I'd met two weeks before to go to the Telluride Bluegrass Festival. It was a couple of hundred miles away, across a mountain range and a desert. I stuffed my little '74 Toyota station wagon with a tent, a big foam mattress, and a guitar, and we headed off. At the top of the mountain range there was some snow lingering on the side of the road (this was in July), so we pulled over and made a little snowman. Then, down in the desert, we stopped at a reservoir and built a sand castle on the shore. We dug a tunnel beneath it, me on one side and her on the other, and when we got to the middle, our fingers touched. It got dark before we got to Telluride, so I drove a little way up a side road and we set up the tent in the middle of nowhere and spent the night.

When we got to Telluride, I discovered that tickets to the festival were $50 each, a lot of money in those days (at least for me). I had it, barely, and we sat on the grass and listened to the fiddlers. For lunch, I fried up some homemade tofu (she was a vegetarian) on my Svea. We camped out another night, and then headed for home the next evening. Driving through the dark, we could see, off on the horizon, the lightning of distant thunderstorms.