Abby's knuckles were white from her intense grip on the steering wheel, as she maneuvered her car up and down and around all the hairpin turns on the roads that snaked through the Colorado Mountains. Oh, the scenery was majestic, for sure, but she wasn't really able to enjoy it like she would have liked to. Instead, her eyes were constantly focusing on the dangerously close mountain sides, loose fallen boulders and short guardrails, or more often than she cared for, lack thereof. She also couldn't understand why people were just speeding past her, unless they were locals and they had more faith in their trucks than she did in her 12 year old car. Her car obviously wasn't made for mountain driving, and she was starting to worry if she'd even be able to make it out of the mountain passes.

 

When the mountains seemed to subside and she thought the worst was over, there were the foothills and the Eastern Colorado plains. Abby was able to relax a bit now and allow her eyes to take in the scenery, only what she saw now didn't look very healthy. The drought was certainly taking a toll on the residents of Colorado, and especially the ones who still maintained active ranches and grew things in order to make money to feed their families. And, though there were few and far between, Abby also noticed that there were some pretty expansive and elaborate looking ranches out in this area. She couldn't decide if being semi-isolated was a good thing, or a bad thing. All it would take is one blizzard and the roads around them would be closed. But, folks who lived in the country, especially cowboy country, certainly were well versed in self-sufficient living.

 

Abby wasn't so sure she'd be as self-sufficient. Just last night, Abby had encountered a nasty fog that slowed driving to 10 miles an hour, and that was enough to almost give her a full-blown panic attack. It also didn't help, that her car was old and becoming unreliable. But, at least Abby had some form of entertainment while she was driving. There was no cassette or disc player in her car, but the radio in her old Hyundai still worked even if other things had been slowly breaking down on her. What did she expect? The car, a gift from her father twelve years ago, was practically an antique now and really had too many miles on it for her to be traversing through the mountainsides in it. She often joked with her friends that she needed to get a specialized license plate for it listing it as an 'antique' when she renewed her tags every year.

 

A blink of light caught her eye, and a quick glance at her dashboard revealed that the car's warning lights were illuminated. Abby rolled her eyes. They always were lit up. She could refill her windshield wiper fluid and the low fluid light would turn off for five minutes, and then come back on. Every time she stopped to get gas, the check engine light would come on right after restarting the car. Abby's mechanic told her it was just dirty fuel injectors, and he told her to buy a cheap bottle of fuel injector cleaner and add it to her gas tank before she filled up with gas the next time. She did, and sure enough that particular warning light flickered off. There was always some selection of warning lights lit on her dashboard, and some of them remained on even if the problem was fixed. Hell, even the emergency brake light flashed at her to warn her that she was driving with her emergency brake on, the same emergency brake that was currently in its proper resting position. Abby was chalking it up to faulty sensors, and that nothing was seriously wrong with her car. It was just old, getting senile, and losing its mind. Maybe her car was a hypochondriac.