
The route to get that memorable photograph was not a traditional one. It required us to pile our parents into our van and drive them up a bumpy, unfamiliar, unpaved mountain road. When Chuck turned the van off the highway and on to that road, our pace slowed dramatically. For quite awhile our vehicle bounced and bumped as we encountered rocks, switchbacks and washed out road conditions.
I loved my husband's response and the poem he shared with her :
We could have driven home that day from our Blue Bell ice cream excursion in Woodland Park via the smooth, predictable, efficient route down the highway.
Instead, we went another way home via Rampart Range Road.
I'm so glad that we persevered that day...up, across and down that slow, bumpy, washboard mountain road...an alternative, inconvenient route towards home...to make that memory.
The route to a beautiful outcome is often marred with turbulence.
Chuck
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.