I took a road trip with my honey last week to the Oregon coast, where the shortest river in the world, the D, meets the ocean. This was not a "roughing it" sort of road trip. Staying at Shalishan Spa & Golf Resort is more like the "lap of luxury" sort of trip. In all fairness, two weeks ago I woke up in a pup tent in the forest.

Got tension in your life? See what happens when Mother Earth gets tense, up close and personal.

Crack in the Ground, in south central Oregon, was formed some 10,000 years ago when volcanoes erupted in the desolate Fort Rock Basin. Subsequent earthquakes put pressure on existing fault lines and the resulting tension ripped open long fissures in the ground. Virtually all of these fissures filled up with lava or caved in. At Crack-in-the-Ground, however, the gash is still open and stretches two miles long and up to 70 feet below the surface of the earth.

“Entering the crack is like entering another world,” says geologist Daniele McKay. “The path descends into a narrow slot between high rock walls, the desert dryness is replaced by cool moist air, and the sky becomes a narrow band of bright blue high above the chasm.”

The sky is falling!

I couldn’t help but think this, as I watched meteors streak across the sky last week, while the Perseids Meteor Shower reached its most dramatic hours. What did prehistoric peoples think when they saw this amazing spectacle? The sky is falling. The gods are angry. The Earth is passing through the dust trail of a comet. Run for your life! Whatever the explanation, today we run toward meteor showers: a celestial Fourth of July.