It’s Friday afternoon at 4:00 p.m. when we head out for our Labor Day celebration that is taking us on a crazy journey all the way to South Dakota and back by Monday night. Over the course of this out-and-back marathon, we’ll travel more than 2,700 miles or 4,300km.

We know this road well but feel the need to snap a photo along the way from time to time, so if in the future we no longer have the capacity to travel as we do, we’ll have these visual and written reminders of thousands of random spots along our path.

By 6:00, we passed through Flagstaff. By 7:00, we stopped in Winslow for coffee, but the one shop that sells the stuff was already closed, and we don’t do gas station coffee. From time to time, in the distance, we see flashes of lightning, but we never find ourselves in the thick of it. Shortly before midnight in New Mexico and on the other side of Albuquerque we pull into the Sunset Motel in Moriarty for a night of sleep.

Dream Note: I wake just after 5:00 from a dream featuring guidance from God to stop traveling with fear. It told me that my afterlife would be a composite of places seen, dreamt of, explored, and feared. I had input into what could be my version of hell if I allowed fear and anxiety to be drivers over the course of my life. To some degree, this reminds me of the story from the Robin Williams film What Dreams May Come that I watched six years ago. In the dream, I’m an infant learning to navigate an infinite space that doesn’t conform to the physics of our world. I’m being encouraged not to give in to fear as I fly, levitate, and careen wildly through my universe.

I’d like to add that this dream happened three years before I started sleep therapy using a CPAP. During these days of such fitful sleep, I was often startled by the vivid, nearly lucid nature of my dreams that were often happening near the edge of my waking state from not breathing and my body’s desperate desire to fall into a deep sleep as soon as I rested my head.