road trip 2012! it begins… notes

day one: pittsburgh pa to columbia mo. 726.3 miles (according to gmaps, didn’t count them myself) 12 hrs 24 mins (again, thnks to google) really really hot everywhere favorite car-bound entertainment: harry potter and the sorcerer’s stone motel, no camping :-/ day two: columbia mo to broomfield co 734.7 miles (gmaps) 11 hrs 47 mins […]

the sunshine state

we have left our wood pile and fireplace and  hopped a plane for florida. in florida, it doesn’t need to be sunny to be warm. thank goodness. it’s cloudy, but it will still be in the 80s today, and we’re all wearing shorts. and no socks. yippee! the house is wide open, glass doors slid […]

wood

it takes a long time to move and stack a cord of wood. i know. i just spent two hours stacking half a cord of wood and moving the other half into the back yard. i doubt that my method was the most efficient at getting the job done. it was only me, my arms […]

our own little sampson

oren grew some hair this past year–he hasn’t had a haircut since april 2011, and it seems to be a big deal for him to have long hair. daily he reminds me that his hair is the longest in the family–even longer than mine! and somehow, like sampson gained strength with the length of his […]

90 degrees and 90 percent humidity

there is absolutely nothing worse than climbing while it’s 90 degrees outside with 90 percent humidity. except maybe falling off the empire state building and catching your eyelid on a nail (what IS grosser than gross?). but that’s what i did this weekend–climbing in nasty weather, that is. and i have to say, i would […]

surprise free time

pop-pop came and got the boys from me a little bit ago. we loaded their booster seats into his new-ish bright red jeep liberty so they could go to his house and help him with putting up a castle in the tree house. so i have some unanticipated free time. time to myself. i haven’t […]

the end.

i was going to write a post about leaving santa cruz, and how sad i was, and how driving through nevada sucked, and how uplifting it was to get to salt lake city. i was going to write about how pretty and well located salt lake city is, in the valley between three mountain ranges. […]

Sand in the bathtub

Because we went to the beach today. We drove from Tuscon AZ on Monday and stayed a very cold night in Joshua Tree National Park in So Cal. J Tree is a climbing destination, so it was hard for us to be there only a few hours and not climb. Well, okay, we did climb […]

Dust in the wind

Finally, a cold front! Finally, the temps are down in the lower 80s! We should be happy and content about this turn of events, yes? Well… We are mostly. The only problem is the wind. A cold front cannot come through without some sort of atmospheric upheaval, and here in El Paso TX, we are […]

Revisitation

It is almost impossible to revisit a place without comparing it to the other times you have been there before. That’s what I have been experiencing a lot these first four days of our second trip to Hueco Tanks. There are some similarities of course. We are staying in the same camping spot we did […]