July BOOKS!

July was vacation month, so I did more vacation reads than anything else. Who am I kidding? I always do more vacation reads than anything else. Hah! I just did even less non-fiction and thought-provokers than usual. I also did more re-reading than I have done recently, because when I'm on vacation in new places, I crave familiar territory in my books! Travel is best with an anchor. I'm either anchored at home reading far and wide or traveling far and wide with a nice homey re-read anchor. 

The Elusive Enchantments

One of the premier hiking areas of the central Cascades is in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness. It is so beautiful that the official name of the area is The Enchantments. I've written about it before. The trail through the Enchantments is 18-20 miles long. I have done 5 miles up one end of this trail to Colchuck Lake, and 7 miles up the other end to the Snow Lakes. The middle 6-8 miles include the Core Enchantments, which I have been drooling over ever since I visited the "border lakes." I really wanted to do one more trail run before cross country season and school started up, so I researched, prepped, planned, and packed for an epic daylong adventure straight through all 18+ miles of the Enchantments. It was a process. 

The first half of August

 August is barely half over, and we've already had two bouts of wildfire smoke drift in and out. Clips from my journal:

Monday, August 2nd: Blast this wildfire smoke! Jeff and I spent some time discussing and finalizing our cross country schedule for this fall. It feels strange and good to have an actual schedule for an actual normal season! 2020 kind of killed my zest for thinking far ahead and making dependable plans, so knowing what the next 3 months will look like feels new.

Summerland and Panhandle Gap

Hello, Tahoma! On Monday, I went to Mt Rainier's Wonderland Trail for a Zen-run to Summerland and Panhandle Gap. This was my first solo Shaina trail run of the summer, and it was just as soul-filling as I hoped. After spending half of July exploring the Tetons, driving/hiking/biking in the Rockies, and viewing the Grand Canyon, visiting the central Cascades felt like coming home. I ran this same section of trail last year too, so my feeling of homecoming was amplified. The placement and shape of the alpine wildflowers and the snow was slightly different this year, but the journey still felt joyfully familiar. 

Grand Canyon, Beaver, and Home

I. The Grand Canyon: We left our hotel in Holbrook, AZ at 7am and drove the almost 2.5 hours to the Grand Canyon South Rim, entering from the east on 64. We stopped at the Desert View visitor's center on the east side of the park and saw our first Grand Canyon panorama. It was breathtaking and big and beautiful! We were in awe. Thunderstorms were in the very near forecast, however, so we nixed our family bike ride plans and stopped at several canyon viewpoints as we drove west on 64 along the south rim. From the road, the canyon rim was mostly hidden by scrubby pine trees, so it wasn't a very scenic drive. Every time a brief canyon view opened up through the trees, we yelled "NATURE!" and pointed or tapped or smacked the window. It was silly, but our kids are so used to totally zoning out on car rides that they weren't even looking out the window much on their own before we started the nature shouting. We unplugged all screens and stories when we entered the park as well, to encourage nature appreciation.

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.