Already she had been from her western Colorado hometown as far to the northwest as Olympia and Seattle and even on into British Columbia. She had travelled down Highway 1 to visit relatives in L.A. and Fresno and San Diego and flown all the way to Guam and Tokyo in one direction and New York and Frankfurt in the other. She had lived in San Antonio and Chicago and Oklahoma, but always returned to Colorado. And then she climbed on the backseat of a motorcycle and spent 21 days traveling to other places. She slept in a wheatfield in Kansas and saw the fabled Poconos and the outskirts of Philadelphia and the inskirts of Manhattan and almost ran out of gas in the lower tip of Michigan. She camped on a beach in Massachusetts and felt guilty; not merely because the sign said it was illegal to camp on the beach overnight, but because she had traveled far and wide from the western most boundary of Colorado all the way to New England and had not yet done the State of Colorado justice – did not yet know her own home state like the back of her hand. So, over the decades that followed, she attempted to remedy that. She saw the Colorado side of Dinosaur National Monument, she hiked all the trails at Colorado National Monument, she visited Rocky Mountain National Park and hiked to the headwaters of the Colorado River, she rode the train from Denver to Grand Junction and down Ruby Canyon into Utah. She camped in State Parks and saw the Royal Gorge and almost burned her feet at the Sand Dunes. She lost herself for awhile and drifted all the way down the Colorado River through Arches and Moab and Canyonlands and straight on into Arizona and saw the new London Bridge way out in the desert and dipped her feet in the Colorado River anywhere she could until it finally died somewhere out in California. And then she came back, determined to hike every trail, and climb every mountain, and paddle every stream that she could before she met her final goal of dying in a beautiful place. Nowadays her adventures are peppered with descriptive sounding places like Silverton, Ice Lakes, Highland Mary, Treasure Falls, Weminuche Wilderness, Lake City, Animas River, Cataract Gorge, Alpine Loop, Red Mountain, Grand Mesa. And you know what? She still doesn’t know her home state like the back of her hand, but what she does know is beauty.