city folks go west

Crunch, crunch, crunch.  My hiking boots made the pebbles talk.  And then, they would squirm, moving in unanticipated directions, causing my ankle to twist and my body to awkwardly stumble forward.  The dry heat, lovely at the start of our adventure, made us stop for water every 5-10 minutes as the day wore on.  One kid fell into a cactus (don't ask me how; I didn't see the incident, but only the scratches on her face and legs afterward which corroborated the story).  And this was supposed to be fun!?  Absolutely!  We loved every minute of it.

On our Christmas vacation, we headed out to Arizona to be with my brother-in-law and his family for a week.  There are 6 of us and 7 of them.  (I've never asked, but always suspected that he had one more child, just to beat the size of his older brother's family! ;) At any rate, we were quite the sight everywhere we went.  It was like "Cheaper by the Dozen", except that none of the kids looked like Ashton Kutcher and none of the parents looked like Steve Martin, but still...you get the idea.  There was quite a bit of chaos, that's all I'm sayin'.

Early one morning, the baker's dozen of us packed our pb&j sandwiches and piled into a van and headed about an hour outside of Phoenix for a day hike in the Superstitious Wilderness (oh, and I'm writing this on Friday the 13th----how apropos! :)  

The vistas, the connections, the challenge of climbing up (and later running down the mountain)----it all added up to a lovely way to spend our Christmas season.  Who needs a white Christmas anyhow?! ;)