I’m alone on pad 1 waiting for liftoff. This is the dullest place I have ever been.

All hail Jefferson for the patience and persistence he showed in vindicating the American experiment, and letting Napoleon suggest the purchase as a way of solving some of his own pressing problems. Jefferson could not have done what I am doing. He was too civilized. I wonder how often he bathed? We know he had severe digestive problems. That had to be a mess in an age before toilets and ready hot water. You want to have robust pipes for a journey like this.

The night before, at another camp altogether, I heard a lone man, ca. 35 or 40 years old, play a ukulele for a couple of hours, just plucking out rhythms and bits of song.

Sundays always remind me of my father Charles Everett Jenkinson. He has been dead for a quarter of a century now, but on Sundays I often miss him acutely. But he would never come on such a trip, not for all the money in the world. He thought camping was very silly: why jettison ten thousand years of improvements in comfort to sleep under a tree?

There is a “dispensary” in nearly every block of the main streets of larger Colorado towns. People at tables talk “weed” as people elsewhere talk sports or current events.

When I stepped out, all I saw was a billion stars above the pine trees. That alone made the trip satisfying. There are few sounds more satisfying than a breeze in pine trees. It is a different sound from breeze in cottonwoods. They thwattle and click, because the dance of the leaves makes them bump into each other.

I am hoping by this time tomorrow I will be John Steinbeck’s lesser cousin Chip Steinbeck somewhere in a state park, of which there are very many, in Colorado.

My goal, as always, is to avoid the interstate highway system whenever possible. The secondary roads are always more interesting. The pace is slower. The surrounding countryside is closer at hand. There is a retro-America feel to travel.