How many of the two to one protagonists of Europe know, for instance, that scenic motor highways already run to the very edge of the grandest scenery in America? You can motor now from Texas to Wyoming, up above 10,000 feet much of it, above cloud line, above timber line, over the leagueless sage-bush plains, in and out of the great yellow pine forests, past Cloudcroft--the sky-top resort--up through the orchard lands of the Rio Grande, across the very backbone of the Rockies over the Santa Fe Ranges and on north up to the Garden of the Gods and all the wonders of Colorado's National Park. With the exception of a very bad break in the White Mountains of Arizona, you can motor West past the southern edge of the Painted Desert, past Laguna and Acoma and the Enchanted Mesa, past the Petrified Forests, where a deluge of sand and flood has buried a sequoia forest and transmuted the beauty of the tree's life into the beauty of the jewel, into bars and beams and spars of agate and onyx the color of the rainbow. Then, before going on down to California, you can swerve into Grand Canyon, where the gods of fire and flood have jumbled and tumbled the peaks of Olympus dyed blood-red into a swimming canyon of lavender and primrose light deep as the highest peaks of the Rockies. In California, you can either motor up along the coast past all the old Spanish Missions, or go in behind the first ridge of mountains and motor along the edge of the Big Trees and the Yosemite and Tahoe. You can't take your car into these Parks; first, because you are not allowed; second, because the risks of the road do not permit it even if you were allowed. * * * * * Is it safe? As I said before, that question is a joke. I can answer only from a life-time knowledge of pretty nearly all parts of the West--and that from a woman's point of view. Believe me the days of "shootin' irons" and "faintin' females" are forever past, except in the undergraduate's salad dreams. You are safer in the cave dwellings of the Stone Age, in the Pajarito Plateau of the cliff "bird people," in the Painted Desert, among the Indians of the Navajo Reserve than you are in Broadway, New York, or Piccadilly, London. I would trust a young friend of mine--boy or girl--quicker to the Western environment than the Eastern. You can get into mischief in the West if you hunt for it; but the mischief doesn't come out and hunt you. Also, danger spots are self-evident on precipices of the Western wilds. They aren't self-evident; danger spots are glazed and paved to the edges over which youth goes to smash in the East. * * * * * What about cost? Aye, there's the rub!