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"I point the car vaguely toward Florida and start driving. Just outside of Grand Junction civilization vanishes and for the first time I&amp;#039;m fully aware of just how stupid this is. I am a long way from Daytona, and there&amp;#039;s not so much as a single friend between me and the Florida state line. If something goes wrong between here and there, I&amp;#039;m on my own. It&amp;#039;s exciting, and lonely, and a little bit terrifying. I didn&amp;#039;t used to have this sort of nagging anxiety about hopping in a beater and covering a few hundred miles at a stretch. Maybe I&amp;#039;m slowing down. Or maybe it&amp;#039;s the fact that this car has a good 100,000 miles on any other machine I&amp;#039;ve ever driven. But the Miata feels fantastic. The engine is still bright and punchy, but there are brakes where there were no brakes before. The cowl shake has waned and I no longer worry about whether or not I&amp;#039;m going to lose the windshield. The new suspension is firm, but not punishing. The car&amp;#039;s confident enough to make up for my misgivings. I stick the speedometer at 85 and watch the Rockies grow larger in my windshield. There isn&amp;#039;t a thank you card big enough for the Flyin&amp;#039; Miata team. The road works its way up from the low country, flirting with rivers and lakes along the way. The sky&amp;#039;s nearly as blue as the hood in front of me, and chasing the muddy water along its banks is what this car was built to do.  RELATED: To hit Daytona&amp;#039;s banking, this old Miata needed extreme upgrades I didn&amp;#039;t set out to cross the Rockies at Monarch pass, but I guess that&amp;#039;s the joy of wandering: you find yourself heading somewhere special without ever knowing what&amp;#039;s ahead. The road to the top is a three-lane masterpiece that serves as the Million-Mile Miata&amp;#039;s first post-shop stress test. The blacktop works up to a 7 percent grade as it snakes and winds from one switchback to the next, and as the air thins, the little 1.6 has to work harder than it has in years to drag me to the top. It never once stutters, falters, or fails. The temperature drops drastically, and snow begins to show up in the shadows. With the top down, I switch the heater to low and keep charging. At 11,312 feet above sea level, the pass is the highest the Million-Mile Miata has been all year. I am aglow with irrational pride in my little blue engine that could until I pass a dude pushing a Vespa into the welcome center parking lot. Just like that, thrashing a 329,000-mile Miata up the pass doesn&amp;#039;t seem so hardcore. His name is Lars Ringel, and he&amp;#039;s one of three guys riding Vespas from LA to New York City over the course of 60 days. Lars is from Germany, and he tells me that while his friends made it up the incline just fine, his machine lost power a few yards from the top. Laughing, he asks if I&amp;#039;m doing a $500 challenge with the Miata. I restrain the urge to remind him that only one of us walked up the mountain. His friends are from Japan and the States. They pose for pictures and joke with their support crew. If they make it, they&amp;#039;ll ride the full breadth of Japan next year.  RELATED: I survived Utah&amp;#039;s wastelands and all I got was this crappy Miata An hour or so off the mountain, the road turns into another empty two lane. Endless open fields stretch off to ridgelines in the distance, delineated by the occasional dirt road and a row of mailboxes. That&amp;#039;s where I find Kyle, the hitchhiker. I don&amp;#039;t realize that he&amp;#039;s sitting on a pack roughly the size of the Miata until I come to a stop. He says he&amp;#039;s only going about 30 or 40 miles down the road, so he throws his things behind the roll bar and jumps in. He spent the winter working at the ski resort at the pass, and now he&amp;#039;s headed to some sand dunes to camp for a while before finding somewhere warmer. &amp;quot;I was really hoping to get to ride in a Prius,&amp;quot; he says. Any concerns I had about being murdered and left in a ditch immediately vanish. I ask if he&amp;#039;s ever ridden in a Miata. He says it&amp;#039;s his first, then asks if I smoke grass. I say no. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s good, man. The cops watch the border for cars with out-of-state plates leaving Colorado,&amp;quot; Kyle says. He looks grave. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;d get stopped for sure.&amp;quot; He&amp;#039;s young, tall, and has blonde hair half way down his back. The orange lenses in his massive sunglasses reflect the iridescent countryside as we sling down the road. I spend the next half hour listening as he tells me why the federal government has no authority over the people of America and how he practices the barter system whenever possible. I let him out at the trailhead to the dunes and point the Miata toward New Mexico.  RELATED: Chasing down a burglar in our $1,600 Miata I cross the border without seeing a single officer, and the landscape immediately shifts tone. The lush, green grasses of Colorado disappear in favor of the yellow fields of New Mexico. Fences along the road keep piles of tumbleweeds at bay. This is the backdrop of every high-plains Western I&amp;#039;ve ever seen, and I can&amp;#039;t stop staring at the impossible horizon. It&amp;#039;s an entirely new form of beautiful. I&amp;#039;m staring at the mesas to my left when I catch something big and quick flashing across the road to my right. It&amp;#039;s a tumbleweed approximately the size of a small buffalo. I don&amp;#039;t have time to swerve, curse, or wince before we collide. The big, dead plant erupts into a hundred thousand tiny splinters. I don&amp;#039;t even feel it from behind the wheel. At the next fuel stop, I find pieces of the thing embedded into every nook and cranny the car has to offer. The only real damage is a set of minor scratches across the right driving light. The car looks good with another scar. New Mexico eventually gives way to the agro-industrial wastelands of Texas. It&amp;#039;s nothing but train rails, sprawling cattle farms and silos five times as large as any other structure around. There&amp;#039;s nothing to stop the wind from whipping across the ground and slapping you in the face, so that&amp;#039;s precisely what it does. I have to hold the steering wheel at a 15 degree angle just to stay in my lane. I pass a &amp;quot;CAUTION: HIGH CROSSWINDS&amp;quot; sign. I laugh at the late warning until I pass two silos stacked right against the road&amp;#039;s shoulder. The round structures funnel the wind into one hell of a vortex, and I&amp;#039;m in the oncoming lane and back again without so much as a single input from me.  RELATED: The Million-Mile Miata&amp;#039;s 3500-mile Daytona odyssey - Part 1 I don&amp;#039;t trust the air conditioner compressor to function for any length of time without seizing, destroying the accessory belt, and causing all sorts of mayhem. I keep the top down, and my skin turns coarse under the waves of grit that blow from the side of the road. All that dirt in the air makes for a spectacular sunset. Orange, red, and yellow drench the horizon, and for the first time, I get why people love Texas so much. It&amp;#039;s the America the rest of the world thinks about when they&amp;#039;re feeling sentimental: vast, unending, an inescapably gorgeous. And there, riding out of the setting sun, is a new color: flashing blue. Traffic in Texas moves right along. The speed limit on most major arteries is 75 mph, but the population can&amp;#039;t be bothered to crawl along at that velocity. Never one to eschew the local custom, I joined suit and poured on some throttle. The fine officers of the Texas State Police found this objectionable. Getting pulled over in a convertible with the top down is a unique experience. The conversation starts the instant the officer opens his door. I&amp;#039;ve had plenty of chats with law enforcement over the years, but none were ever this pleasant. It started with a friendly, &amp;quot;Hello.&amp;quot;  RELATED: Restless in the West The guy looked like he could pick up the Miata and put it in his pocket, but he was as courteous as can be. He let me know that he stopped me for speeding, was curious why I had a Tennessee license and a car from California, and wanted to know where I was headed. After I told him all about the car, the hair-brained scheme to drive it to Daytona, and my day so far, he laughed, let me take a picture of his cruiser, and let me off with a warning. &amp;quot;Slow it down, drive safe, and enjoy the fine state of Texas.&amp;quot; I make it just north of Dallas before finally giving up and finding a hotel shortly after midnight. When I step into the shower, the water turns black as the sunblock, dust, and dirt from two very large states washes down the drain. Follow all of the Million Mile Miata&amp;#039;s adventures on Facebook. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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