BOOM! The whole car shook as we hit another pothole.  As we were speeding down the road on the side of a mountain, I felt like we were going to fall and plummet to our deaths in a 7 seat minivan filled with 9 people’s voices talking about completely different things.

“How did you do on your quiz yesterday, honey?” My mom asked my sister while at the same time my other sister talked to her friend about her nails.

“They’re so pretty,” they said probably 40 times and I was just sitting there trying to read over what seemed like millions of voices surrounding me.

We were going to Tolantongo, Mexico home of their world famous caves and one of the most dangerous roads in the world.  As we were going down the dirt road, able to see the bottom of the mountain just looking out of our window, my sister tapped me on the shoulder, “look” she said pointing at the window.  As I looked out of the window I knew that I was going to see something breathtaking because the car was quieter than it had been all day.

When I looked out of the fingerprint stained window that separated myself and nature, I saw the most beautiful thing that I had ever seen.  Outside of the window was the stunning Peloncillo mountain range of the state of Hidalgo, Mexico caving in to make a perfect box canyon with the small canyon town of Tolantongo formed around a jewel-blue stream.  Along the side of the mountains you could see small pools, almost like baths, with people in them looking out on the alluring mountain range that sat in front of my guileless, amazed eyes.

As the trees consumed the view that I had grown very fond of over the past few minutes, I had a yearning to see it again as the car rolled to a slow halt in the bumpy dirt road.  As we all got out of the car, I was the last one out and on my way out all I could hear were the “oooh”’s and “ahhh”’s of my family and friends.  It sounded as if all of their breaths had been taken from their throats.

As I walked out of the car, I heard my mom say to my sister, “now isn’t this beautiful?”

When I finally got out of the car, my friends and family were taking pictures of each other behind our car where another cliff extending down to the canyon could be found.

It wasn’t until I joined them that I realized what I saw in the car wasn’t the most beautiful thing that I had ever seen.  This was.  It was the consummate view of mountains covered in alluring green trees overlapping each other all put together with the flawlessly blue sky and the perfect amount of sunlight to reflect against the trees and to our eyes in the most beautiful way possible.  When we had to leave to make it to the campground where we were staying in time, all I could think of was the eye-popping, jaw-dropping view that I was able to say was a part of my life.

The best part of my experience with this mountain range that caved into a canyon holding a small civilization of campgrounds that we didn’t expect anything out of, is that the vacation that we traveled all this way to take, hasn’t even started yet.