Continued from Page 1 -- It was hot. The 90-degree mountain sun was burning a farmer's tan into the back of my neck and arms. The plume of dust that followed us all the daylong had finally stricken me into an unforgiving case of cottonmouth. I'd had it.

"Hey man. Reach back there and dig us out a couple of cold ones," I yelled out over the squelching CB ruckus. "Hold on though, I've shifting her into 4-low and gonna crawl over these rocks."

The slow crawling CJ slowed to a snail's pace. The inline six was plugging along effortlessly.

"Why the hell do you strap things down so damn well?" He said trying to reach his way into the Igloo.

"So we don't have five pound blocks of ice belting us in the back of the head when we get a little tipsy. That's why," I said, steering the rig through one of the nastier parts of Miller's Jeep Trail. "Just grab us a couple of cold ones!"

"Well, you've got to be Superman to get into this thing. You've got it all belted in as if we were headed belly up down a cliff," he said as he unbelted himself from the shotgun seat. He then turned around, unbelted the ice chest and fished out a few brain freezers.

"Hurry up and strap yourself in."

"Nahhhh. I'm cool man. Heck, we're only doing about a mile an hour."

"Yeah, but that's my windshield, Superman."

Just as he reached down and grabbed at the bottle opener on the T-case shifter, the Jeep lunged up onto a tire-sized boulder, and I heard a thud, screech and saw a spider web erupt in front of us. Broken glass!

"Ahhhhhh. . . Duhhh? Sorry, dude."

Needless to say, some 300 buck later, I had a shinny new green tinted windshield installed. Green tint sucks. After racking up an expensive phone bill, I found that green tint was the only thing available for the CJ windshield at the time.

Green tint reminds me of the hazy tar and nicotine-stained tint on an old '64 Continental I used to know - you know, the one with the suicide doors and a gas guzzling 460 beneath the hood.