There's more to mountain driving than you might think.

Clicking pics has been going on for a thousand years, even cavemen clicked the pics.

Hibiscus flower and unhatched family members

As you can imagine moving my departure date up by more than a week has put me under a lot of stress to get myself mentally prepared to leave so quickly.  I have had to allow myself extra relaxing time to deal with the pressures of having to hurry through my regular slow and methodical preparation regime.

Taking a mini-vacation into the mountains is a lot more complicated and requires much more preparation than say going to the beach. Because when you go to the beach, it's flat, the beach is flat, the waters flat, the area is flat, everything is flat.

But when you go to the mountains, there are hills, and unlike going to the beach when all you have to do is make left and right turns. In the mountains, you have to make left and right turns, AND you have to go up and down. So driving in the mountains is twice as hard as driving to the beach because you're driving in four dimensions, up down left and right. There's also a fifth dimension when you drive over a cliff and disappear into a bottomless Canyon.

To get on the road as quickly as I need to, I'm going to have to forgo some of the preparations that I would typically make to be sure I have a safe, no drama, trip.

I won't have time to pack a spare pair of underwear, so I'll just have to wear the ones I've got on and hope I don't go over the cliff into the Bottomless Canyon. And if I do, it better kill me because I won't have a change of underwear available.

I won't have time to test my Grizzly Bear repellent spray on the family dog. So I'll have to just hope that I don't run into a Grizzly, because there again I've only got one pair of underwear.

I don't have time to look for my Coast Guard approved lifejacket. Now you flatlanders may wonder why I would need a lifejacket in the mountains. That's probably because you've never driven over a cliff into a bottomless Canyon before. You see, in the bottomless Canyon, there's a river, and when you drive over the cliff, eventually your going to land in that river. And if you survive the fall, your gonna need a lifejacket..... And probably a change of underwear.

So I think maybe I'll take a few extra minutes out of my busy day and pack a change of underwear... Just in case.

                     theboondork

Golden Rose.

Grown-up flower blossom hugging his younger brother to protect him from the Japanese Beetles that are wreaking havoc on the flowers.