The Day We Didn’t Know We Had

The reason Justin and I drove to Colorado was not because I had a sudden desire to spend more than thirty hours sitting in a truck.

I would have preferred to fly and get it over with. Get on the plane, get off the plane, and be wherever we were going. That has always made much more sense to me.

There was also the matter of Justin doing most of the driving. He and I drive very differently.

Let’s just leave it at that.

The real purpose of the trip was for Justin to hike his mountain bike up Mount Elbert, the tallest mountain in Colorado, and ride it back down.

This was not entirely out of character for him. Justin regularly bikes up and down mountains here in the White Mountains, and he makes it look much easier than it is. But Mount Elbert rises more than 14,000 feet above sea level. Justin also has Type 1 diabetes, which added another layer of risk to something that already felt very risky to me.

I was worried.

Before we left, I had created several stories in my mind about what was definitely going to happen to him. None of them were good. I could not seem to imagine a version of the trip where he completed the ride, came back safely, and everything was fine.

At one point, I asked him to give me a TED Talk about high altitude and its effects on Type 1 diabetes. I wanted to know that he understood what could happen and was preparing for it as much as possible.

There was also a wildfire burning near Leadville.

The Willow Fire had already closed the trails around Mount Elbert, but Justin continued planning. He hoped conditions might change by the time we arrived.

My first response was to tell him I was not going.

That did not stop him. He was still going to go, except now he would be doing it alone.

That idea horrified me even more.

I tried to convince him to hire a guide. He would not. Eventually, I asked if I could come with him. I was not going to climb Mount Elbert or pretend that I suddenly thought this was a great idea. I just wanted to be nearby.

I wanted to support him in doing something I did not agree with.

That was new for me.

I do not know if I had ever consciously chosen to do that before. Usually, when I am afraid for someone, I want to talk them out of whatever is frightening me. I want to point out every risk, offer a better plan, and keep going until they agree with me.

This time, he did not agree with me.

The choice was whether I could be there anyway.

When we finally arrived in Leadville, we were staying at more than 10,000 feet. The elevation affected me almost immediately. I did not sleep well for the first few nights, and during the day I felt tired, foggy, and generally not alive.

My body seemed confused about where all the oxygen had gone.

The Willow Fire was still burning nearby. We could see smoke in the distance whenever we left for the day. One morning, I stepped outside and could smell it in the air. We spent most of our time driving away from Leadville to explore other areas.

Within the first couple of days, Justin realized that Mount Elbert was not going to happen.

The trail closures were still in place, and the fire made the decision for him.

I was relieved.

He probably will not enjoy reading that, but I was.

Part of me believes there are forces in this world that we cannot see. Forces that protect us, redirect us, or quietly interfere with plans that may not be right for us yet.

I do not know whether that is what happened. I only know that Mount Elbert was taken off the table, and Justin had to decide what to do with the trip he had planned around it.

I watched him work through that disappointment and begin looking for other opportunities.

On my birthday, we climbed Mount Sherman together, another mountain over 14,000 feet. It was the first time either of us had exercised for that long at such a high elevation.

It kicked his ass.

It kicked mine too.

We made it to the summit, but the experience gave Justin a much clearer understanding of what his original plan would have required. Climbing at that elevation was hard enough without carrying a mountain bike.

Later in the trip, he found a trail near Vail that he said was the best he had ever ridden.

By the end of our time in Colorado, he was not focused on what he had missed. He was grateful for what he had been able to do instead.

I was proud of him for that.

It is not easy to change direction when you have already decided what an experience is supposed to look like. There is a particular kind of disappointment that comes from being physically close to a goal and still unable to reach it.

But sometimes the original plan falls apart and something else takes its place.

I thought that was the lesson of the trip.

It was not.

Our last full day in Colorado was busy. Justin planned one final bike ride, and I found a trail to hike nearby. We wanted to make the most of the time we had left.

The next morning, we packed the truck and left around six.

We knew the drive back to New Hampshire would take more than thirty hours, so we planned to stop somewhere around the halfway point and sleep.

We drove across Nebraska.

Then we kept driving.

By the time we reached Illinois, we started talking about whether we should continue straight through. We believed Justin needed to be back at work on Monday, and we felt like we were under pressure to get home.

Our plan became to keep driving until he could not drive anymore.

Around two in the morning, somewhere that may have been Ohio, Justin finally pulled into a rest area. We reclined the seats and immediately fell asleep.

Two hours later, I woke up and nudged him awake. He was so tired that he could not remember where we were at first.

Still, we got back on the road.

We arrived in New Hampshire around four in the afternoon. We unloaded the truck, showered, and went to bed early.

The next morning, we woke up believing it was Monday.

Vacation was over. Justin needed to return to work. I needed to drive back to Littleton, see William, and begin figuring out what had happened while I was away.

I picked up my phone to look at my calendar.

Sunday was highlighted.

I stared at it for a moment, confused. I knew it was Monday.

I checked my Garmin watch.

That said Sunday too.

I told Justin that my phone and watch were both wrong. In my mind, that was somehow a more reasonable possibility than the alternative.

Then I started looking more closely at the calendar. I checked our Airbnb reservation and saw that it had been booked through Saturday.

When we had left, the app would not let me complete the checkout process. I had assumed it was a glitch.

Suddenly, that made sense.

The day we thought was Saturday had actually been Friday.

We had left Colorado a day early.

We had driven through the night because we thought we were racing home in time for Monday morning, but we had arrived in New Hampshire on Saturday afternoon.

It was Sunday.

Justin and I looked at each other and started laughing.

I grabbed my pillow and threw it down on the bed. I could not believe we had gotten our days mixed up for that long. We had checked out of our Airbnb early, left Colorado early, and driven almost straight through the country because neither of us knew what day it was.

Part of me was sad.

I loved Colorado, and I had not been ready to leave. We could have stayed for another day. We could have had another adventure, another hike, another evening looking at the mountains.

Justin saw it differently.

“We get a bonus day,” he said.

A free day.

We had gone to sleep expecting to wake up to responsibilities. Instead, we woke up with an entire Sunday ahead of us.

The day felt completely different because we had not expected to have it.

Nothing about it was especially extraordinary. It was still just Sunday. It had the same number of hours it would have had if we had known about it all along.

But it felt like a gift.

That feeling stayed with me throughout the day.

I started wondering why I did not feel that way every morning.

Every day is a bonus day.

Not every day is a vacation day. Not every day is restful or fun. Some days are filled with work, stress, appointments, problems, and things we would rather not deal with.

But every morning we wake up, we have been given another day.

We do not earn a certain number of them. We are not promised that we will have time later to do the things we keep putting off.

I wonder how differently I would live if I woke up remembering that.

Would I notice more?

Would I be more willing to change my plans?

Would I spend less time imagining everything that could go wrong and more time being grateful for what is happening right now?

Fear took up a lot of space for me before this trip. Some of it was reasonable. Mountains, wildfires, high altitude, diabetes, exhaustion, and driving through the night are all things worth taking seriously.

Preparation matters.

But fear has a way of becoming the only story we can see. It convinces us that worrying is the same as protecting ourselves or the people we love.

I began the trip thinking about everything that could be lost.

Justin’s original goal was lost. A day in Colorado was accidentally lost. Many hours of sleep were definitely lost.

And somehow, what I came home with was gratitude.

I have stopped scrolling as much on social media lately because so much of what appears in front of me is painful. People are losing their lives every day, sometimes suddenly and in ways that make no sense.

The thought that my own life will end is uncomfortable. It can be frightening.

But maybe it does not only have to be frightening.

Maybe knowing that our time is limited is what allows us to recognize the gift of still being here.

Sometimes a bonus day arrives because two exhausted people accidentally lose track of the calendar.

Most of the time, it arrives much more quietly.

We wake up.

And there it is.

-Amanda