"What's Your Favorite Memory?"

1999, during a massive road trip I took by myself. I passed through Colorado on I-70, and on a whim hopped off the interstate and took the old US 6 up Loveland Pass to the Continental Divide. The pass tops out at about 12,000 feet, and there's a trail that climbs the ridgeline another thousand feet. I climbed that trail, and a cold rain drizzled over me and gathered in little ponds that drain in two directions, down both sides of the divide. I sat on a boulder and watched the clouds pass beneath me, thinking of the path those little streams would take: one way down the Colorado River, through the Grand Canyon to the Gulf of California, the other way down the Platte, the Missouri, the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. I listened to the sound of wind in tundra grass and nothing else. It was a perfect moment.

Other memories, because I like the concept even if nobody else is into it:
* I was maybe three or four and with my parents on my first road trip to Florida. I never slept on road trips, so I sat up front with my dad, standing in the seat and looking back at my mother and brother. I said to my dad, "They're asleep, aren't they?" He said, "yeah." Sometime around sunrise, we stopped at some sideroad stop in Alabama. We walked through a pine forest and found giant pine cones.
* 2002 or so, with my significant other in a parking lot outside Jackson, Wyoming, standing in the cold, watching the Northern Lights.
* 2006, walking through Haines, Alaska with that same significant other.
*1992, my first visit to Chicago, one hour at 3 a.m.