As I cruise through my fifties, I allow for expansion in my life by buying those special blue pants with the elastic waist band and the balloon seat, thank-you very much!!

     I'm lucky in that I grew up in a family of travelers.  
     Every summer,after school unleashed us 4 kids, we would all pile into a wonderfully decrepit station wagon and rumble off to places unknown.  We didn't know exactly where we were going, but we knew we were making good time!
     Dad and mom would split the driving up, making for 50% terror and 50% calm.  You figure it out.  But, we did, in fact, end up at Expo '67 in Montreal while it was still open, we arrived in the Black Hills, Yellowstone, the Amana Colonies and countless other funny little tourist traps.
     Consequently, I learned to Go With The Flow!  Don't let the rocks and logs scare you, flow around them like they didn't matter and let gravity take through the journey. 
     While I was wonderfully fooled into thinking we arrived at destinations, never considering the journey, I learned to laugh at where I later would break down on my old Harley-Davidson, relish in the sunsets and sunrises where I finally gave up trying to make the map match my location, later learning I had the wrong map!  HA!
     However, I am not a good traveler in that I only stop for gas when I have to pee, never before.  I am known for having a cast iron bladder, so beware!  And, I can drink coffee like the good bachelor Norwegian farmer I am.
     But, I like anything that is on the radio, including the All Polka Channel or the Clear Channel AM stations that only talk about aliens and abductions.  I like gas station food, I can see the humor in Country Western music, I have found that there is a rhythm to the road, just have to find it.  Finally, I will laugh at just about any joke you offer up!

     This place that I call home, as I now have lived here longer than any other place I have live, can be the best of places and the worst of places.
     Its moments when it's the best of places usually come when I am outside and out of town in the backcountry.  The small nature of our town; only 3 square miles, is that "out there" is only a hop, skip and  a jump away.  In a few minutes I can be deep in the mountains that surround Aspen, no signs of civilization for as far as I can see.   Or, in this case, the photo shows that the signs of man's passing are only the signs that he used to be here, but he is gone now, leaving his monuments and structures to moulder away back into the earth.

     Or, if I must be in town, I can sit on green grass outside a huge white tent that is housing hundreds of world class musicians playing the last refrains of a summer's worth of music. 
      Or, I can go listen to the Dali Lama speak in an intimate setting, or, watch the nominated Oscar films in a 100 year-old opera house sitting in real, honest to goodness purple upholstered seats.  Or, if I must, catch some unbelievable youngsters (everybody is a youngster to me, so get over it!) fly through the air on snowboards or skis and do tricks and flips that I didn't really think people could do, until I saw them do them!
     But probably the best thing about this place is, as Glen Fry said, all my friends are here.  A small tight group of people that I count as friends whether they be work friends or those outside of work that I see way too little of both.
     For a while, I thought about leaving this place.  Back in '98, a series of tragedies that seemed to never end thinned out my family to where I just wanted to sit down and give up.  That's when I thought I really had no more ties to this community until I realized that what had sustained me through those awful few years were the friends that I could count on my two battered hands had stood quietly by me.