We had penciled a backpacking trip onto our calendar for fall break months ago, but it wasn’t until the week before that we actually decided what we were doing. We’d originally wanted to backpack in Canyonlands, but didn’t realize how competitive the permits were and that our fall break was at the same time as the entire state of Utah. Undeterred, this just challenged us to go even further off the beaten path. Finally, we decided to backpack the Halls…
As the fourth of July approached, we weren’t feeling very enthusiastic. All the fireworks shows were cancelled and honestly, we weren’t feeling terribly patriotic and didn’t have much of a desire to be around people who were. We decided it would be best for us to get away from everyone and enjoy some of our nation’s natural beauty.
I mentioned in my last post that we had permits to raft the San Juan river. Way back in March we snagged the permits. We didn’t get selected through the lottery, but after lottery recipients accepted or declined they released any extra permits. Quarantine had just started and we figured things would be better by June. As the weeks progressed, we began to realize there was a strong chance the trip would be cancelled. Noel was calling the BLM office…
I have been wanting to go to Costa Rica for years. I can’t pinpoint exactly what attracted me to the country. I do remember learning about Costa Rica in high school Spanish and thinking it was cool that they didn’t have an army. As an adult looking at traveling internationally for the first time, it helped that it’s a relatively safe and very peaceful country. Being gorgeous and warm didn’t hurt either.
Our big summer trip this year was a trip to Yellowstone and Grand Tetons. We booked our Yellowstone campsite months ago, put it on the calendar, and then just kind of got distracted by other things. When we were debating whether to rent a pavilion for our cheesecake party, Noel and I made a pros and cons list and enumerated the reasons why it was a good idea. One of our biggest reasons would be that our house wouldn’t be…
By the time the eclipse was on our radar we figured we were just too late to be able to see it. There were rumors of 10X10 foot spaces on golf courses going for $100/night and Motel 6 renting rooms for$1000/night. We tried to tell ourselves, that a 90% eclipse would still be cool and we’d be glad we missed out on traffic and hoards of people. Plus, the kids would have just started school. There was some part of…
“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby Summer is a magical time at our house. Bedtimes aren’t as important, homework doesn’t exist, and there is so much possibility for adventure. Our kids also seem to be in this golden period of childhood. They have…
We decided kind of last minute that we wanted to take a long weekend and go camping. We knew it would be a popular time to go camping and were surprised when we found a campsite that was still available to reserve, so it seemed meant to be. (It turned out there was actually a computer glitch that had left a campsite open, but the camp host just reserved a typically non-reservable site for us.) We went hiking and decided…
Our last day in Zion, I added up our hiking mileage for the day and realized that the kids had hiked 6.6 miles. This realization of the kids’ capabilities and a new mantra to savor life (losing someone will do that to you) got our wheels turning. It was time for us to finally backpack Coyote Gulch. We’d read a blog post a few years ago about a family that took their 4 and 7-year-old and had felt inspired, but at the…
October was one of those months where I would think, “Life can’t get any crazier than this” and then it would. My job as a middle school freelance educator came to an end at the beginning of the month and our family was ready to get back into a normal groove. Life had other plans though. Two big things happened in October: my mother-in-law was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer and my grandfather died. Those two things were pretty…