In July of 2009 I married the smart one, and her name is Lee-Ann. Usually the smart one is the one that gets away, often leaving skid marks in my case. But this one stuck around. How is she smart? For starters, her car history is about a half a paragraph; she's owned two cars her whole life & her current car is almost at 300,000 miles. That's gumption!

Anyway, for our wedding and honeymoon, we elected to put another new set of tires on the truck and take it on a cross-country road trip spanning three weeks, five National Parks, and what became 8,800 miles with a Vegas wedding in there somewhere. I honestly didn't give a shit if the old bomber even survived; I just wanted to see some good country. What happened was the trip of a lifetime, and the journey that gave Myrtle her name, and my respect.

The naming process wasn't a big character arc for the truck or anything. Lee-Ann just decided that if we were to put enough trust in her to carry us through blazing hot, remote Montana desolation, up & down the Rockies, through the Redwood Forest, across the majestic Candy Mountain where unicorns fear to tread, etc., etc., the least we could do was name her. Lee-Ann brain-crapped out the name "Myrtle" in some misty, faraway land, and that was it. Myrtle was christened out there on the road to our future.

And road-worthy she really was. When we left, she was gobbling about 18 MPG per day. As we returned, it was averaging above 20. Now, I'm sure this isn't because of anything more mystical than the hills & roads we were traversing, and our collective abilities to drive without hammering 4000 RPMs up hills with the cruise control on. Still, it just smacks of real character on behalf of the vehicle more than anything else.

Myrtle was a lot more patient than we were. After hundred-mile climbs in 95-degree heatwaves, her temp gauge never strayed from the middle of the safety zone. The only time we almost overheated was while parked in some highway construction gridlock while blasting the air conditioning. We shut it off for three minutes and Myrtle cooled right back down to normal. That was a sweaty afternoon for us, but at least we were sweating on wheels instead of on foot (or on an airplane home).

This truck carried my new wife and I, along with a guitar, a keyboard, two sleeping bags, and a cooler full of alcohol and hot dogs, all across this massive country without complaining once. Every would-be blemish on her record was caused by the dumbasses charged with her care. This truck put the "rusty" in "trusty" and to this day I am impressed daily by her stamina.

Who would have thought such an innocuous vehicle could turn out to be my favorite? After all the fireballs of testicular girth I allowed to devour my bank accounts? This shoebox... this very, very... BROWN contraption, has bored itself so deeply into my heart that I can safely say she shall be the first motorized companion for whom I weep when she drives off into her sunset someday.

West we went from Connecticut that summer, through Chicago and Minneapolis to Devil's Tower, Yellowstone, Glacier National Park, and finally our first left turn in Seattle. Along the coast Myrtle hastened us until our second left in San Francisco, and after a bear-cluttered night in Yosemite we wed in Las Vegas. She took us through Zion before finally heading back east 500 miles per day for our final 4-day haul back home. We sampled real Kentucky bourbon to sooth our road-tortured brains on the second-to-last day, and it was like breaking the marathon ribbon. Myrtle got a couple oil changes and a grill full of gigantic grasshopper guts for her dessert, and she gratefully gobbled it down with a grin. It's been another 50,000 miles since then as I write this update, and she's still smiling, partly because we brushed her teeth when we got home: