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Then, just before Christmas in 2006, I got my Toyota FJ Cruiser.

No carpet, rough synthetic cloth seats, strange doors and a dashboard big enough to serve a buffet on, it was pretty much love at first sight. I put it in gear and drove off the lot.

And now, here, about half-way between Barons and Granum and more than 11 years later, the FJ Cruiser and I were still humming along. Earlier in the day – just after sunrise, actually – we’d been over in the Little Bow River valley watching deer in the fields and then stopping for pictures of gulls and shorebirds at Clear Lakes east of Stavely. It had been cool then but the now the heat of the day was starting to build.

I wasn’t really paying much attention to any of that, though. It was lovely but then it always is out here.

No, I was watching the odometer.

When I’d pulled away from the house that morning it read 699,841 kilometres. Now, on a gravel road shimmering in the heat, it had just turned over 699,997. I slowed down and watched as the digital readout silently changed to 998. I propped the camera on the horn ring and focused as the eight turned into a 9.

A thousand metres, 100,000 centimetres, later I slowed to a crawl. The entire display changed.

It read seven, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero.

It had just turned over 700,000 kilometres.

Here’s some numbers to help put that into perspective.

The distance from the earth to the moon is about 384,000 km. The city farthest away from Calgary is Saint-Paul, 16,000 km away on Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean. The most distant city where people that I know personally live is Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Jaci and Dan live 13,780 km away. My friend Bayar lives in Ulan Baatar, 8,300 km to the west in central Mongolia. Good ol’ Miggy lives in Santa Barbara, California. It’s just 2,600 km down the road, barely a two-day drive.