After all, what was there that needed to be said? Accidents on the highway can happen without warning and without mercy. The events seem to happen instantaneously and often brutally. One moment everything is wonderful, the next moment....well, for some there is no next moment.

That one moment is sometimes the last moment...and that's that....no do-overs....no anything.

It's amazing how one thing can be so many different things to so many different people. The same road can be a path to a whole new life for so many people one day...and a graveyard for others the next. A week on the road can feel like a month sometimes because you see and do so much in such a short amount of time.

So far I had only been on the road for just a few short days and already I felt very different. My new career as a truck driver had just begun and already It was clear that life on the road was going to be an amazing and unpredictable journey unlike anything that had come before.

So with that incident behind us a new day began and we were forced to try to forget about it. After all, none of the other options were going to lead us anywhere good. So on we went.

We got our trip to California. I had never been west of Ohio and couldn't believe the amazing scenery we passed along the way. The trip out there took several days and I enjoyed every incredible minute of it. When we got out to the rockies in Wyoming the scenery seemed straight out of a movie about the old west.

Well, DUH!

It WAS the west of course but television was the only way I had ever seen it. It seemed liked a dream. It was hard to imagine that you could leave the oak and maple covered mountains of the east, go across the endless corn fields of the Midwest, then cross the high desert and Rocky Mountains of the west, and come down out of those rocky mountains into one of the most fertile valleys in the world in central California all in just a few days time and you're still in the same country!!!

From sea to shining sea, indeed.

The beauty of this country can not be understood or conveyed through pictures, or in words, or in song. You can meditate, speculate, and postulate day and night but until you've traveled these highways yourself and have seen this land with your own eyes you know nothing of America The Beautiful.

The song was written from the experience of someone who had seen this great land not because they thought they could convey to others what they had seen, but because they so desperately wished they could and just couldn't bear the agony of not trying.

Our land is truly something to behold.