Magazine Cowgirl on Vacation

What most of you suspect is true: I have one of the world's great jobs. Even so, there are those (rare) times when I get to leave the nag-mag world behind for some personal R&R. (JST translation: NO writing! For four whole days!)

Not that the cowgirl stuff stays home when the magazine cowgirl goes on vacation. Nope. It comes right along. I spent my precious days off by attending a Sisters on the Fly event in the mountains of central Idaho. As you could see from a visit to the SOTF Web site, sistersonthefly.com, the cowgirl mystique is highly revered by this group of fun-seeking women. As are all cowgirl trappings.

Perfect. For that, I don't even need to go shopping. I just empty out the hats-and-boots closet, grab some tack from the barn, and I'm set.

At right: My vintage trailer, all 13 feet of her, was the only RV of any kind at the first campground I stayed at on my road trip vacation.

Some observations re: the road:

* My trip was 200 miles, each way, and the whole time I was driving, everything seemed sharpened--in this weird "better now than never" way. I was keenly aware that "affordable luxury" (that of buying fuel for recreational travel) is on its way to becoming a one-word term. I savored it while I could.

* The reduction in highway traffic, from last summer to this summer, is profound. The only drivers I saw in any numbers were big-rig truckers. It seemed pretty lonely out there in two-lane, U.S.-state-highway America. I spent my first night out at an RV campground that came complete with high-speed wireless Internet service--and was the only one there.

* Those big house-on-wheels rigs that such places were built for? I saw more of them parked at the ends of driveways, with FOR SALE signs, than I did ones going down the road.

* The 60 or so Sisters who defied today's fuel logic, and showed up anyway, were NOT there to complain about the cost of getting there. They came to play, and that they did. I didn't hear any discussions about fuel prices. But I did pick up on that same appreciative vibe, the one with the little voice that says, "I'm going to enjoy doing this now, while I still can."