Rushing the season

Okay, we're rushing the season again. Just got my first Fall Catalog from Crate&Barrel which they have casually called 'fall's very Best Buys'. We used to rush just the xmas holiday - now we seem to rush the season's and all the holidays.

One knows that retailers are desperate for us to spend but why bring fall into the picture? I just know that Land's end is around the corner with their fall clothes. Scarfs in July? Phoenix is not a place for fall until say late October. We don't even think about it until September (really all we can feel is the heat and wonder what happened to fall, ' it seems late this year'. It's never late - it just doesn't exist for more than a week or so. We have to travel up north to even see a hint of all the seasons. What we should get is summer sales catalogs. A new angle for retailers . . . send us catalogs for the things you can't sell in September . . . we're there dude!

Primitive Road Ahead

Shortest route. That's one of the 'guides' offered on our GPS unit in our Prius. We were on the way to visit friends and stay the weekend in their cabin in Groom Creek - an area outside Prescott. It highlighted a route I had never seen to Prescott so I punched it in.

The presets should have precluded this route as an unimproved road but it didn't so . . . we took it. It was very well graded at first. All the way to 'Potato Patch', an area in the middle of the route that had around 4 cabins in it. As we continued on it became very apparent we should not be on this road in a Prius. It deserved nothing less than a Jeep of some sort - our other vehicle. This creek (really it wasn't a creek so much as what was left of the morning rain going across the road) should have warned us. But we trekked on. Rocks. Steep grades. Interesting moments with the differential wheel base. About halfway through the bad part we stopped to take a look and let a large truck through. When John stepped up in response to his query "Are you guys all right", the man's son piped up that they had a very large truck. One could imagine the conversation in the truck prior to their stopping -

They agree to follow us in case we ran into trouble for the remaining 13 miles. Those 13 miles took us around an hour and a half. Switchbacks, more potholes, more steep grades, more rocks and more water, more-everything. Towards the end all we could see was the fine blue line on the GPS unit weaving around, back and forth with no real understanding of where we were other than on the Senator Highway.

We've agree that our car now carries the name 'Intrepid'. She deserves it. We arrived to tell the tale - suitably crafted to be more horrible than it was. We'll do it again someday - in the Jeep. And if we're in the Prius - we'll take the 'Quickest Route' . . .