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FROM THE EDITOR: Life should be about the journey, the adventure

Sometimes you just have to take what comes and enjoy the adventure.

I am writing this column at 80 mph traveling the interstate outside Green River, Utah on Wednesday night.

I find myself near the Colorado state line because Tuesday afternoon I received an email alert that I had a doctor's appointment in Denver on Thursday at 2 p.m. As everyone knows who has ever dealt with appointment makers for medical specialists, communication gets garbled and you find yourself with an appointment you didn't know you had.

In this case, the appointment was in 40 hours and 765 miles away.

As fate would have it, I had the next few days off because I had planned another type of trip. My wife and I had taken Wednesday through this Monday off to visit the northern part of the county on the way to and from the Nevada Press Association awards ceremony Friday night in Sparks. I have overseen the editorial content of this newspaper, and the Tonopah Times-Bonanza & Goldfield News, but have not been north of Tonopah. I wanted to spend the days around the Friday and Saturday event visiting places such as Round Mountain, Manhattan, Belmont and Gabbs. Places within Nye County talked about during county commission meetings but a couple of hundred miles from the Pahrump Valley Times office.

If we are going to report on the places, it would make sense to visit them to get a better understanding of the challenges facing those communities. It is a challenge because the county is so ridiculously large, third largest in the lower 48 at 18,000 square miles, that getting to some of these places takes more than just a day or two.

So that was the great plan, until Tuesday evening when I got the appointment notice.

I'm sure I could have emailed the office in a panic, panic being I thought I may have lost the appointment I thought was at the end of this month, and explained that I couldn't possibly make it because I'm here and they're there.

But where is the adventure in that?

When I got home Tuesday evening at 10 p.m. I suggested to my wife that instead of pointing the car north Wednesday morning that we point it east and make the Denver appointment. After all it's a 12-hour drive, and very doable.

But that was only part of my plan.

Then, after the appointment, we jump in the car, point the car west for Salt Lake City where we sleep for a few hours before blazing a trail to Sparks to make it in time for Friday's award banquet at 6 p.m. Then visit Gabbs and Tonopah on Sunday.

My wife agreed.

The total driving distance between Denver and Sparks is 1,050 miles, or 15 hours. That was not happening in a day.

If all goes to plan, we should be somewhere between Salt Lake City and Sparks as you are reading this (I'm hoping many of you have made it this far in the column).

The point of this road story is that sometimes in life unexpected events happen and we just have to enjoy the adventure. Sometimes I get so wrapped up in the day-to-day of my life that I lose track of just enjoying the adventure.

This week marked a year since I was hired as editor of this paper. As I've recounted recently in this space, it has been an adventurous 365 days. There have been some bad times, the worst being the death of community editor Charlene Dean. But the good times have outweighed the bad.

I look forward to what the next 365 days brings. I look forward to the adventure.

That is if I make it back from the one I'm writing this one from.

Arnold M. Knightly is the editor of the Pahrump Valley Times

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