In Ancient Times....

Back in 2006, @afturner and I met in Gainesville Florida where she was recording an album at a studio owned a guy named Lawrence, who my neighbor happened to work for. It's a very long story, that one day I may tell, but suffice it to say that her guitarist was my roommate and one thing led to another, as it does.

As with all good love stories, She had to leave and go back to Los Angeles, and I decided to leave my job and home in Florida to go with her to a completely unknown town. But let's just say we decided to take the scenic route to southern California from Florida. And by scenic, I mean the longest route possible!

We drove straight up through Georgia, to Kentucky. Then through Ohio and all the way up to Minnesota. We went to Wisconsin and all the way west across the country. We actually didn't really have any specific goal in mind of where we wanted to visit, we just kept driving with the intention of eventually ending up in Los Angeles. Needless to say, the trip ended up taking a few weeks!

At some point we ended up in South Dakota and it was getting super dark. Me being an idiot, I had no idea that this was where Mount Rushmore was located. It just so happened that we stopped at a hotel for the night very close to the famous exhibit.

The hotel was in a town called Sturgis, which I also knew nothing about. But I was about to learn a lot about Sturgis, because we were rudely awakened at the crack of drawn by the noise of what sounded like 1000 engines revving up. Thinking to myself, WTF is going on, I opened the balcony and stepped outside to the largest group of senior citizens with giant bellies I have ever seen. And all of them were on their own motorcycle.

It turned out that by blind luck we arrived on the very morning that the biggest gathering of bikers in the world began. It is called the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, which many of you keen readers probably already know about. Being a computer nerd, I had no idea that this was even a thing. Sadly I didn't point my camera at any of it, because I was too busy in awe of just how many motorcycles I was seeing. Especially since I had no idea that it was even happening.

Once we got up and dressed, we went outside and walked into the office of the hotel. We asked the owner, "Is there anything to see around here?"

This was of course a hilarious question to her. She kind of looked at us weirdly and asked us if we had any idea of where we were at. Of course we didn't, so she proceeded to tell us about Mount Rushmore not too far away. We shrugged our shoulders, and headed on down!

When we met, we kind of bonded over our love for the movie "Team America, World Police". Before we went on our trip, we must have watched it 20 times. That made it even more funny when we ended up accidentally at Mount Rushmore, where if you watched the movie you'd know that the Team America base is located inside of the mountain.

We kept reenacting scenes from the movie pretty much where you see Amanda standing in the photo. Of course no one had any idea what we were doing and were giving us really funny looks. Us, of course, in our new relationship just found everything hilarious and were just having a blast.

I'd have to say that this 3 week trip across the country was probably in my top 5 experiences of my life. I am sure that the new love had a hell of a lot to do with it, but it was also the spontaneity of how we were behaving as young silly kids just doing whatever the hell we felt like. It's funny how freedom has so little to do with the actual content of your experience, but everything to do with how you perceive yourself. Happiness is absolutely a state of mind!

Now I just need to let go of all the baggage that I've built up over the years and just be again. Wouldn't that be something?