When we got back to Phoenix, nearly everyone went off to bed as soon as possible. Sue and her son and I stayed up, building a puzzle. At 3 a.m. we finished it, and he went off to bed. I started to tell Sue that I just couldn't go back, and that I was leaving, and before I realized what I was saying, I'd asked her to go with me.

In the same breath I begged her to say no. I didn't want her family broken up like mine; I didn't want to throw away a lifetime of moral values, to offend the sensibilities of all our friends and family, to take a step which I knew could never be undone. I knew it would be hard to leave alone, but I knew it was for the best.

Sue didn't answer directly. Instead, she started talking about her marriage, her kids, her job; all the things that made up her life. I was relieved; it clearly sounded like she was explaining why she was going to stay.

Instead, she said, "So, I've been waiting all night for you to ask me." We sat, stunned, for I don't know how long.

We were both already packed for the drive the next morning. Well, that morning; by now it was 4 a.m. We simply picked up our bags, Sue wrote a note for her daughter (who, if it wouldn't have caused her even more emotional damage, we would have taken with us) and we walked out, got a cab, and went to the airport.

Our goal was San Francisco, the place where we now realized we'd fallen in love eight years ago. Last minute flights were frightfully expensive, but a rental car was only $25 a day. We both love driving, and figured this would give us plenty of time to think and talk on the way. We had more time than we thought possible, as it turns out.

Instead of taking the 'sure thing' across from Phoenix to Los Angeles, then heading north, we set a precedent for our driving patterns over the time we've been together and headed off on smallish state highways, planning on turning left at Las Vegas and heading right across Yosemite to San Francisco. Sure, the road through Yosemite said 'Closed in Winter' but it was the last weekend of May, so I wasn't worried.

We arrived in Las Vegas in the heat of the early afternoon hoping that we could catch a flight from Las Vegas and finish the trip by air. The Las Vegas airport apparently starts at one side of the city and ends at the other side of the city. We parked the car in the rental return lot, let them know we were not sure if we were done with the car yet, and started the trek across the airport to check on flights to San Francisco. When we arrived, it turned out flights from Las Vegas to San Francisco are only marginally cheaper than flights from Phoenix to San Francisco. So we trudged back across the airport, got in our rental car, and headed down the road once again.

By now, after 36 hours without sleep, we both were just the tiniest bit groggy. Sue took over driving for a bit and I somehow managed to doze off. I woke up as my head bounced off the window to look over and see Sue sitting cross legged, weaving down the mountain road with cruise control on. Feeling it was a bit early in our new relationship to complain about her driving techniques, I merely voiced the fact that I’d never used cruise control on mountain roads before.

I remember thinking that if things started to feel out of control I’d stop using cruise control. And just about then I knew it was time and that things were just about out of control.

Moments later I decided that if our relationship was going to get much older I should speak up as we dove into a curve in a little valley. Apparently Sue felt same way as she jammed on the brakes almost too late. I think we put about 20,000 miles on the tires in the next 100 yards and just about as many miles on my heart. Fortunately we slid to a grinding halt against the side of the mountain to the left and not in the ravine to the right or an oncoming car (there weren't any.) We decided not to use cruise control in the mountains anymore.

My adrenaline rushed caused me to feel it was a lot more fun than scary. But I’d never want to do that again.

Crossing the state line into California, we found a small, small town where everything was closed except a convenience store which didn’t have anything appealing for dinner. We asked the proprietor where the nearest restaurant was and he said we'd just passed it one block back. I said "They were closed." He said, "No, they're open." We drove back and sure enough the ramshackle, unlit, once-a-gas-station building was a restaurant, and was open. I don’t remember what we ate but we enjoyed it.

(I believe Joel had chili.)

(So, what did you have?)

I had been calculating our intended progress based on freeway speeds which these tiny, winding highways wouldn't permit. We arrived at the highway crossing Yosemite shortly after dark.

It was closed.

We drove back up the road to a gas station and asked about it. Everyone in the gas station said, “Oh yeah, big snow late April. It will be closed through June.” Not wanting to wait through June, we asked the locals about the shortest route to San Francisco. They unanimously suggested that from Phoenix we should have driven 10 to Los Angeles and north on Interstate 5. I said thanks and asked if there was a way to get there from here. They directed us up 395 (which ultimately goes all the way to Lake Tahoe and beyond) and across 50 through Sacramento to San Francisco. But rather than wasting an extra hour driving all the way up 395 to 50, they said to ' one hour up 395, take 89, then 88 across to 50 and it would save more than an hour and from there it’s two or three hours to San Francisco.'

So thinking we had only four hours to go and we’d be in our hotel room in San Francisco around midnight, we headed up 395, clinging to the edge of the mountain, with gorgeous scenery to our right in the moonlight and mountainsides straight up on our left. We came to 89 exactly where it was supposed to be and few short minutes down this microscopic winding road we came to 88 and headed down a smaller, even more winding road on the other side of the mountain tops. With mountains to our right and a ravine to our left, we wound down 88 for what should have been a 10 mile drive to Interstate 50 and an easy three hour cruise to San Francisco. But even at those speeds, ten miles shouldn’t have taken half an hour. We finally dug out the map and couldn’t find where we were. There didn’t seem to be any road marks, we hadn’t passed any towns or other roads, and just kept driving till we found something, a small town, not on our map. So we kept going. An hour later we came to a small town and took out the road map and retraced our route on the map to discover we should never have left 89 in the first place. It would have taken us straight to 50 and we’d be cruising at freeway speeds by now.

Realizing too late that it no longer made sense to find a way to the interstate, we looked at the map and decided to continue down the beautiful mountain road to somewhere south of San Francisco and head north into the city. This was a mistake. By now it was past midnight, my eyes felt like sandpaper and we were driving 15 miles an hour in the center of this tiny, weaving road because we didn’t want to bounce off the mountain or bounce off the treetops ten feet from the edge of the road. We wound and wound and wound and wound and eventually wound up somewhere in Lodi, which if you consult a map, makes no sense whatsoever.

As I headed for the offramp in Lodi, nearly 40 hours after my last real sleep, the sloping black of the offramp suddenly became a sheer white climb. I was confused and then I was surprised and then I realized I had fallen asleep for an instant and I was heading for a concrete block wall. Fortunately this all happened a bit faster than it takes to tell it and we went up the offramp, not up a block wall.

We really shouldn’t have kept pushing ourselves. But I, for one, just wanted to get where we intended, the sooner the better.

At least someone in Lodi knew how to get to San Francisco without winding through mountains. We ultimately reached our hotel in San Francisco on Knob Hill at five in the morning, only 25 hours after leaving Phoenix.

After a week in San Francisco, during which Sue’s daughter joined us, we realized that San Francisco was not too expensive for our budget, it was way too expensive for our budget. Thinking I knew a bit about the Sacramento area, we decided to head inland to the center of California’s central valley. Glancing at the map in late afternoon I noticed a suburb on the north side of Sacramento called Roseville. Knowing that Sue has an absolute passion for roses, I secretly decided to see if we could find a place to live, at least temporarily, in Roseville. After an hour or so Sue consulted the map to see how far we had to go and said "See that, Roseville? I want to live there." We spent one night in a hotel in Sacramento and the next day began apartment shopping. By that night were sleeping in the apartment we still live in today.