Friends and Santa Fe

My best friend from college was in Colorado visiting her parents at the same time as us, so before we headed homeward, we got our kids together to swim in my parents' pool on our last day in Denver (Tuesday, July 27th). Rose and Emma were born two months apart, and Zoey and Amber were born five months apart. This was the first time Amber and Zoey have met in person. The last time Emma and Rose were together in person, they were barely two years old, so eight years ago! We spent several hours in and out of the pool, talking and relaxing together. Jay was feeling tired so he stayed inside, but the girls had fun. I know kids can't become best friends in just a few short hours, but it still did my heart good to see my kids having fun with my best friend's kids.

Date Trip Day 3: Sand Dunes

Our final stop on our date trip was Alamosa and Great Sand Dunes National Park. Soon after our arrival in Alamosa on Saturday evening, Jeff found a delicious Thai restaurant on Main Street called Thai Hut. It was our first time eating inside a restaurant together since cross country season of 2019! It was a fun date. After eating, we went on a short one mile walk through breezy chilly downtown Alamosa. Jeff humored me by crossing the Rio Grande on our walk. We actually crossed it twice and made a loop through Cole Park. All of these places were mentioned in Deena Kastor's memoir Let Your Mind Run, which we had recently finished on audiobook, and I admit to fangirling just a little. Alamosa is also home to Adams State University, an NCAA Division II distance running powerhouse. We were feeling some good running vibes in Alamosa, and I was a little sad that we didn't have time to go on a run in town. Our walk gave us a taste of the town, though!

Date Trip Day 2: Bike 'n Hike

After a good night sleep, Jeff and I had a leisurely start to our day at our hotel in Montrose, CO. We packed up and checked out and were driving the 20 minutes to the south rim of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison by 8:30am. We weren't too worried about beating crowds because everything we read informed us that it was one of the smallest national parks and one of the least-visited. When we arrived at the South Rim Visitor's Center, we checked with a ranger to get a permit to do the adventurous treacherous steep hike down into the canyon. For safety reasons, the rangers limit the number of people who can go down into the canyon to 15 at a time. Unfortunately, there was only one spot left when we checked--14 spots were taken--so we decided to go see all of the viewpoints along the South Rim Road instead.

Date Trip Day 1: Exclamation Point

While we were in Colorado, Jeff and I left our kids with my parents for 2 nights/3 days so we could go on date trip. It was our first overnight date in two and a half years! We decided to do a tour-de-Colorado for our date, and it was a road trip within a road trip. We spent over 16 hours driving on several exceedingly scenic byways in south central Colorado, stopping to visit two of Colorado's four national parks: Black Canyon of the Gunnison (near Montrose, CO) and Great Sand Dunes (near Alamosa, CO). 

Our driving route looks so small on the Colorado map! It was over 700 miles of road, which took a while to cover on those winding one-lane mountain roads.

The Denver Brown-cation

We squeezed in most of our favorite traditions during our Brown family get-together: glowy family pictures taken by my sister Em, daily swimming for the kids, mother-sister shopping trip to Athleta, all kinds of kid games with the favorite uncle Braxton, a Dani & Shaina trail run, and of course lots of good food and treats. Gathering with twelve adults and twelve kids can get chaotic, but I sure love my family! Poor Jeff did battle with insomnia and anxiety for most of that week. It's like the bad hotel bed in Wyoming tipped him over the edge into all of the frustrating problems. Thankfully he was able to start feeling better, by the end of the week, with the help of a few key medications. 

Journal excerpts:

Grand Teton National Park

The first leg of our road trip took us to the Tetons, which are located just over halfway between our house and my parents' house. The drive Wyoming went smoothly (in other words, no carsick puking daughters or arguing kids or car trouble). Jeff and I went on a refreshing shake-out run when we arrived in Jackson, and then had troubles finding dinner. Most of the restaurants were full by the time we tried to enter, and we couldn't even seem to find an open convenience store to purchase milk for the cereal we brought for breakfast the next morning. Then we realized that we forgot our bike lock, so we had to unload all of the bikes and wedge them into our tiny motel room between a bed and the window. 

We finally found some BBQ sandwiches at 9pm and went to bed happy. That happiness was short-lived, though, because the beds in our motel were oddly warped so Jeff and I did not sleep much. Having a bad night of sleep mid-road trip is always an extra desperate feeling for the drivers! But we had adventures planned out for the next day, so we got up, loaded up, and drove the half hour to Grand Teton National Park.

Road Trip!

We went on a family adventure for the last half of July. It was a massive mega 2.5 week/ 17 day road trip around the wild west. We drove through Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah. Those are some large scenic states with a variety of mountains, plains, valleys, rocks, canyons, and rivers. We learned (yet again) that not all hotel beds are created equally. I took over 800 pictures while we were out and about, and organizing them into individual blog posts is a daunting task. Writing down a timeline dividing our trip into segments helped me get started.

Sunnyside Sharks 2021

Swim team was short and fun this summer. Practice was four days a week from 7:30-8:30am. Jay and Rose swam for four weeks out of the six week season. It was just enough to get them fit without burning them out completely. Jay swam in three meets, and Rose swam in two. At their last meet, they each swam six events in just over two hours. Hello, fitness-- there's nothing like swimming for an hour a day for four days a week for a whole month. It sure whipped them into shape!

The swim meets were virtual, which meant that rather than traveling to different pools, each team swam in their own pool and compared times afterwards to determine finishing places. Only having one team in our pool made the meets fly by in less than 2.5 hours! Normally meets are nearly twice that long. It is tiring to stand around watching a swim meet in 100 degree weather! I know, I know, it's even more tiring for the kids who are doing the actual swimming, but still. Us parents put a hefty amount of sweat and energy into swim team too! 

Yay USA!

Celebrations for Independence Day were extended because July 4th fell on a Sunday this year. Festivities began on Saturday morning, July 3rd, with a pancake breakfast at our friends' house. The kids played all over the yard while the adults sat in the shade and talked. It was relaxed and pleasant, and I took zero pictures. After breakfast with friends, we came home and went swimming in our next door neighbor's pool. Miracle: I got all the way into the water! I used to love swimming, but the fun has faded over the past couple of years. As I age, I seem to become less interested in processing the sensory array that comes with wearing a swimsuit and submerging into chemically clean water. Wet suit, dry skin, sunscreen/chlorine smells, watery ears, etc. All of those sensations tend to detract from my enjoyment of swimming. But it was a family activity and the kids were so excited for all five of us to swim together, so into the water I went. 

June Books

In June, I embraced the easy summer beach reading style (even more than usual, haha). I barely made it through one non-fiction book, and only two of my fiction books had much substance. (Thank you, Wendelin, for keeping some sense in my literature!) I don't have much else to say about my June reading--no epiphanies or deep thoughts. Not even any shallow thoughts. These books gave me what I needed at the time!

Junend

June has ended. Junend. We have Juned sufficiently. It was a scorcher, so pardon my clumsy wordplay. June journal clips:

Monday, June 14th: Swim team begins! This morning at 6:30 we got everyone up and at 'em for the first day of swim team. At the pool, Amber stood shivering in line waiting to take her swim test, while Jeff and I watched from the other side of the fence. Sweet Amber doggy paddled, mostly with her hands, about 2/3 of the way across the pool (short way) before touching her feet down. She stood up two other times before she made it to the other side, and she didn't make it onto the swim team. She tried again about 15 minutes later, and still couldn't quite make it across. She was pretty sad and discouraged, but we reminded her how young she is (Jay didn't join the team till he was 9, and Rose joined when she was 8). We also reminded her how far she did manage to swim, and we told her we would help her practice a lot this summer so she could make it next year.

During swim team, Jeff and I coached our first cross country summer conditioning session. Six runners showed up! 3 boys, 3 girls. It was awesome having three girls show up to run--a team record for summer training!

Escape to Paradise

Sometimes escape is the only answer. Some of our favorite adventures have been sparked by the need to escape. After college/before kids when Jeff and I were backpacking around Europe, unexpectedly crummy/unsavory hostels or extra-fragrant urine-drenched big city gutters inspired us to escape to last minute hidden gems like Perpignan in southwestern France and Vikos Gorge near the Greece/Albania border. Those unplanned escapes became some of our favorite memories of the entire three month trip. The escape phenomenon has been a recurring theme in our life ever since. We escaped dead-end jobs in Missouri and moved to Washington in 2009. We escaped the Grandview High School construction on the other side of our back fence and moved to Sunnyside in 2017. Each summer we escape the heat of the Yakima Valley in search of cool mountain air. The end of June brought the most extreme temperatures ever recorded to our valley. Escape was imminent.