While cleaning up a mess in the basement recently, I found a box of photos I had lost track of for quite a while. I was even a little afraid the photos may have been accidentally tosses with the trash a while back, but no! They were not! And I am so happy about that.

Here’s one of the photos: My parents were on a road trip across the United States and stopped to see me for a couple of days when they got to Colorado. This would’ve been in 1987 or 88 (most probably in 1988). They posed for this photo before we headed west to spend the day farting around in Estes Park. The hats were from a previous stop in another state.

They were not road-tripping across the USA in a Volkswagen van, I am sorry to say. That would have been awesome. No, this may be the only photo I have of Maria, the Volkswagen camper I drove while I lived in the Denver metro area. I paid a trivial amount of money for it and I drove it all over the southwest United States: to New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada, California, Utah, and Wyoming.