I drove forty minutes down the mountain yesterday to pick up some Amazon packages. The plan was simple: store, packages, back home before the road filled up with Sunday drivers and livestock. Instead, I got to the store at 17:30—smack in the middle of business hours—and found the lights off, door locked, place looking like it had been evacuated. Apparently “closing time” now means “whenever we feel like it.”
I stood there for a second, annoyed, muttering things that would get me banned from polite company, then debated the joy of riding forty minutes back with nothing to show for it but a slightly elevated blood pressure. But there was a mountain pass just twenty minutes up the road that I hadn’t been to yet. At that point, sunk costs being what they are, I figured: what’s another twenty?
At first it felt like I’d made a bad call. The road wound up through the trees, nothing much to see except more trees, and I kept thinking, Congratulations, genius, you’ve now wasted a full hour instead of just forty minutes. Then, just before the top, the forest thinned, the road curled one last time, and suddenly—bang—the whole landscape opened up. A view so wide it looked like the sky had been peeled back.
Then, right before the top, the trees pulled back, the road curled one last time, and the whole world opened up. Ridges rolling away into blue haze, layers of peaks stacked like torn paper, sunlight breaking through clouds in streaks of silver. And on a patch of grass in the middle of it all, two horses grazing, completely unbothered, as if they’d been hired to add “majestic wildlife” to the brochure. I just sat there, engine ticking as it cooled, jaw dropped, staring like an idiot. Almost forgot to take pictures.
It’s funny how a locked store door turned into one of my favorite rides of the trip. Sometimes the wrong turn doesn’t just get you lost—it puts you exactly where you’re supposed to be.
