Wednesday May 28th

I am now in Sterling Colorado after a 1000-mile drive today. Relaxing at a Super 8. I was not as daring as I had desired to be. I did not leave at 4am I drove off at 5:15. I just could not bring myself to get out of my comfy bed. Well I still made great time and there was only traffic in Colorado Springs for about 20 minutes.

My best friend Ralph lives in NYC and seeing as he is 3 hour ahead he is always my early morning wake up call.

I did get to watch the sunrise over the mountain range about 100 miles out of Tucson and I had a most pleasant day. It is amazing to see the transition during the drive north. Here are some of the fun things that I got to see on my driver.

1. Mitchell Pass, New Mexico
2. Truth or Consequences, New Mexico
3. A helicopter refueling in mid-air with a fueling plane (VERY COOL)
4. The VLA, now this is a very high tech and impressive field of telescopes that reside 50 miles west of Socorro, New Mexico. The initials for these 27 telescopes, VLA, stand for “Very Large Array”)
Ah, NASA scientists, as always, masters of the obvious.
I love the fact that they named it this way.
5. Pikes Peak, really big and it still has some snow on top.
6. Denver (but only from a distance) I take the loop to 76 that hooks me up with 80 East.

7. There were hawks, roadrunners, mud swallows, jack rabbits and White Storks.
There was an abundance of wildlife all day long!

Tomorrow I get to experience Nebraska and Iowa. I get a day and a half of relaxation with Cris before the festivities of B&B begin.

OK, I had one of the most amazing experiences of my life earlier this evening. As I passed the Denver airport it started to rain heavily and there were a perfect double rainbow that was south of the direction I was driving. They were there for the longest time and I got the rare treat of being able to see the field where the rainbows landed. As I continued to drive the road twisted in such a way that the rainbow was suddenly in front of me and after a few more moments, I actually DROVE UNDER THE RAINBOW. I do not understand how this could happen. The reason you see a rainbow is because we as viewers are in between the rain of the rainbow and the sun. It should not have happened. Really, It should not be able to happen! It was Fan-F-ing-Tastic. I had a really hard time concentrating on my driving for those 3 minutes. What a wonderful thing to witness.

Why we see rainbows!

-We see rainbows when the sun is behind us and falling rain is in front of us.
-When sunlight strikes a falling drop of water it is refracted, changed indirection, by the surface of the water. The light continues into the drop and is reflected from the back of the drop to the front. When the beam hits the front it is refracted again and emerges from the drop as the color spectrum that we see in a rainbow.

-The water drop acts like a prism to seperate the light into its different wavelengths.

DOUBLE RAINBOW-If the beam is reflected twice inside of the water drop them it will cause a secondary rainbow to appear when the light leaves the water drop. The colors of the secondary rainbow are reversed in order with violet on the top and red at the bottom.