Brad

I used to live in the state of Washington.  In the middle of nowhere, a town called Wenatchee.  My wife and I moved out there because she got a job working at a physical therapy clinic called Biosports.  Wenatchee is a really gorgeous place.  It's just on the edge of the Cascade Mountain range.  It has about 300 days of sunshine a year.  The nights are usually a perfect 65 degrees during summer and around 30 degrees during winter.  It's where they grow Washington apples.

The first weekend we lived there, my wife and I decided to take a trip to a place called Silver Falls.  As we drove along, we began to realize that the directions we had been given were misleading.  So I checked an atlas and found a road that would take us right to the falls.  "It might turn into gravel," I told my wife.  What is it they say about famous last words? 

Let's just say that the road started out as gravel, as it wound up into the mountains.  Before we knew it, we were on a road called 25 Mile Trail.  And then it turned from a road into a trail.  There we were in our Buick, winding up a dirt path that was little more than a set of tire tracks, studded with what seemed like small boulders.  If we met anyone coming the opposite direction, one of us would have had to back up along the road until we reached a wide spot.  Thankfully that never happened to us, though we did see the drivers of some heavy duty trucks laughing at us as they passed. 

I learned some simple math that day.  Twenty-five miles at 10 miles per hour means that you'll be driving for two and a half hours.  I also learned that the straightest road isn't always the best way to reach your goal.