Distant Voyage

It's a good thing to get away sometimes. I am not, as a rule, spontaneous. My wife would like me to be more so. That is why, on the eve of her birthday, I agreed to handing our dog off to one of our good friends, throwing our kid and a change of clothes in the car heading north. We stopped when we reached Calistoga. It was a very nice place with warm mineral springs and mud baths. After lunch and some haggling, we found a hotel that would allow us a few extra dollars to buy dinner.
And there we stayed. For the night. After we spent some time immersing ourselves in the pool as a family, my son and I went out and gathered groceries while the birthday girl enjoyed the wonders that were across the parking lot in the spa. The two boys were just as happy to be wandering around the store looking for dinner as she was to be up to her neck in warm mud. By the time we finished our personal pizzas and Cesar salad, we still had an hour left before the pool closed. Diving in was like falling in to a bathtub the size of our living room. When I came up, the underwater lights had just come on, accentuating the contrast between air. I rolled over and floated on my back and became instantly aware of the night sky. It was different from the one I had left back at home.
The summer sky in the mountains of Colorado was impossibly full of stars. When I was a kid, I had trouble making out constellations because there were so many points of light. Now, decades later, I found myself in this little resort town, away from the big city lights, I had a similar sensation. Only this time, it wasn't just the number of stars. I was staring out into a vast black velvet painting of the sky. There was texture. There was depth. I imagined that I could perceive the distance between the arms of our spiral galaxy. I was sure that I could pick out which ones were blue, and which ones were red. I was floating somewhere in the cosmos.
Then it was time to dry off and go inside for ice cream. Sometimes it's good to get away.