Sundance Kid

Butch Cassidy:  Alright. I'll jump first.

Sundance Kid:  No.

Butch Cassidy: Then you jump first.

Sundance Kid:  No, I said.

Butch Cassidy: What's the matter with you?

Sundance Kid: I can't swim.

Butch Cassidy: Are you crazy? The fall will probably kill you.

Sundance Kid: Oh, shit...

Tell me you all have seen this movie.....an American Western classic.  

I think my love of the West began with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  My little heart pounded at Paul Newman and Robert Redford in their cowboy hats and outlaw roles... deep down thinking these bandits were simply good guys unsuccessfully trying to go "straight."

I could not have been more than nine or ten years old at the time when I first watched the movie with my parents and older sister and brother - maybe it was during our annual July trek to Maine at the Saco Drive-In  (I definitely remember watching the 1975 western Bite the Bullet at that drive-in).  

To this day, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, hands-down, remains one of my favorite films.... rugged landscape, the lawlessness of it all, handsome cowboys, a school teacher who tosses away her tiresome life.... Etta best sums it up..."I'm 26, and I'm single, and a school teacher, and that's the bottom of the pit."  

Hanna wedged in the back

Somehow I must be romanticizing myself into this movie....  wanting to say "no", for all practical purposes, to the uncomfortable "jump" of radically changing up my life.  I jumped anyways.  

I packed up my life, rolled it into the interior of a 4-runner, and drove it West for a year.  While liberating on so many levels, it was definitely not easy.  My packing ability alone, given tight spaces, simply bites ...the bullet.  Perhaps that is why Hanna successfully broke through the dog barrier TWICE! while we were traveling on I-80 West.... once in New York and the other alongside corn rows in Iowa....breaking free of the cube of space I allocated to her - finding her way to the top of the heap in the back seat right behind me.  I pulled over and repacked.  

What I did carry easily into this westward journey of mine was my want for change.  My tightly-tuned intuition ran as smoothly West as my brand new 4 Runner did itself, down I-90/I-80 past The Berkshires, alongside Lake Eerie, over the Mississippi River (which I learned from the Holiday Inn attendant divides Iowa and Illinois.... did you know they have an annual tug-o-war between those States over that River??) Read this:  (http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/travel/ct-trav-0720-mississippi-tug-of-war-20140717-story.html)  

In Chicago with my high school friend Jen Kenoian

That intuition of mine drove me the whole way (when my head did not), from the moment I asked my superintendent for a year leave of absence in June from teaching to getting on the road in September... knowing when to go, when to stop, when to sleep and when to put the miles on to make a destination  - pausing, appreciatively, to see life and a few I love along the way. 

"On the first part of the journey, I was looking at all the life..." - with my Dad (and Hanna)

My wagon made it "West" on Tuesday evening this past week.... to the generosity of Wendy and Jerry in Colorado (who also happen to be neighbors of mine in Cape Elizabeth, Maine).  

I have oriented sweet Hanna to change as kindly as I can - preparing her, so I think, for round two of the change I know lies ahead....plunging deeper into the journey - finding my own place, in time, in the Mountains of Colorado or Wyoming. 

Hopefully, we will survive "the fall".  

Dillon, Colorado

Hanna's and my adventure....love this dog.