We learned a few things on the drive to Colorado from San Francisco. One is that if you're driving to Colorado from San Francisco, the quickest way is NOT down through Bakersfield and Las Vegas and out across Utah, even though that route does take you through Vegas just before dawn, which is a nice time to get gas at a truck stop and make small talk about gas prices with truckers waiting for their shower.

This  meant that when we overheated somewhere around the turnoff to Moab we were already running late, which meant we learned the second thing, which is always wait a while to take the radiator cap off when your car is overheating. Now, this isn't exactly Manhattan Project-type classified material. But chalk it up to Ezra being overeager to get moving again, and the result was Mount Aphrodesia, a furious, spewing volcano right out of the side of our bus that belched murky brown boiling radiator fluid all over the dirt parking lot for a full five minutes (the second and a half thing we learned was that if you do remove your radiator cap too soon, do it on the side of the bus that faces away from the service station attendant). Luckily, we 'found' an extra bottle of coolant on the doorstep of the trailer next door, which we 'traded' for an Aphrodesia CD, but that still wasn't enough to cool us down.

Which brought us to the third thing we learned, which is that calling our bus guru and all-knowing mechanic Sean for advice is a good idea- but only when you actually follow his instructions. Neglecting to stick the water hose into our radiator and fill it up BEFORE we drove off, we hit 220 degrees and counting before we cleared the second row of gas pumps, which brought us in a full circle back to the spent wreckage of Mt. Aphrodesia, where we waited around for an appropriate interval, filled the radiator with water, and drove off without a hitch.

Sean also told us that running the air conditioner through the desert is a good idea for the people in the bus, but a bad idea for the bus. The bus being vastly more important than the people in this instance, we suffer the rest of the way to Vail in a bus with no A/C and windows that don't open.

Which brings us to our final lesson, which is that if you stick your head out of the back emergency exit hatch while someone else sticks their head out of the front, you can get a really neat photo.