I am entering a time and a place of strange ironies.

I am warm and dusty…sneezing, really, on the Interstate, yet the snow of the eastern slopes of the Rockies are facing me.  I’m having trouble making a legal u-turn to get the R-Pod facing in the right directions, yet I can park IN THE MIDDLE OF THE STREET in Sundance.

Sundance! The very name brings to mind Robert Redford and the famed Film Festival.  I embarrassed myself in a coffee shop yesterday asking about it and was told the Festival was actually held in Utah.  I tried to explain that I really knew that..but was just askin’.

After the darkness of Pine Ridge and Wounded Knee, I walked the circuit around Devil’s Tower and found dozens of “prayer bags” and “prayer scarves” placed by the Native Americans who consider the Tower a very spiritual place.  I’m not a huge believer, myself, but I was honored and impressed by the deep souls of these tragic people.  I felt like I was trespassing on sacred ground.  I was.

A small dog barked only a few yards from our camper last night.  I don’t mind animals, but do they have to be so territorial when they are enclosed inside a chain-link fence?

Yes, ironies abound.

As I stood this morning in the mens room of the KOA campground where we stayed, I was forced to hear piped in music, a little too loudly.

My sub conscience kicked in when I began to listen to the lyrics.  I was hearing, for the first time, a cowboy rap song.  This really went beyond irony into, rather boldly I must say, a major oxymoron.  The very concept challenges the imagination.

What was the country music drummer thinking as he (or she) tried to lay down a rap beat to back up the male singer lamenting:

Right now girl, we should drink on it.

Put our hips together and sit on it…then think on it.

Later, we can sleep on it.

[I’m paraphrasing.]

Then, the most bitter irony of all.

I wanted to take Mariam to Old Faithful, Yellowstone Falls, Little Big Horn Battle Site and any other National Park or site.  We had just obtained our Golden Pass that would allow us free entrance to all of these and more.  But at midnight last night, the Federal Government shut down…that includes the Parks.  So, now we drive past these places and stay on the Interstate.

Thank you Tea Party, for making our trip something of a failure.  At least they can’t keep me from my grandson, my daughter and my son-in-law.

I hear there’s snow in the mountains that we have to cross.

That’s nature.  Not irony.