Best Of

Thursday found us on the road again, this time to White Sands National Park. We did one long hike thru the beautiful dunes, and a couple short hikes to points of interest. Perry was in rare form, at one point taking a diving tumble down one of the dunes.

In the summer, this is probably a fairly murderous hike, but in January on an overcast day like it was, it was extremely nice and leisurely.

Today was a 7-hour drive to Roswell, NM with a couple quick stops to capture Pokemon Go gyms in the few towns in between. We ate Mexican (whaaaaat?) for dinner, then Nicole & I visited the, uh, quaint International UFO Museum (& Research Center!) for an hour and then walked around the downtown.... most of which I claimed in the name of Team Instinct. 😁

(yes I made one right side up)

IN! Get ready wine tasting <3

I left my laptop in Detroit so I wouldn’t be tempted to do shit like that.

The upside down photo is actually 2 Vanilla editor glitches: reading the wrong meta on the photo, and also not allowing me to delete it on mobile to try again. Oh well.

How did I end up on a 3-week roadtrip to the Grand Canyon as the coda to my work sabbatical?

Nicole has been planning this epic journey for more than a year. Her and the boys (Perry & Kyle) were going to hike to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, arriving via every other point of interest between there and Detroit in a giant loop thru the western US, sometimes camping. Sometime in late October, I was offered Kyle’s place on the trip.

I couldn’t point to the Grand Canyon on a map of the US. Like, I’m pretty sure it’s in Arizona? I can only name 4 of 15+ stops on this journey. But I definitely know how to backpack & winter camp, and heaven knows I could use a hard mental reboot and a few weeks with my son.

The car is packed, the GPS is ticking, and we’ve just exited the city. Our spouses are holding down the fort at ICHQ and humoring my broken dog for the next 3 weeks. When I return, I’ll have one more week to rest and then it’s off to Montreal to see what the future of my job holds.

I’ll update as I think of it and have a signal.

For the record, she coaxed me INTO finding a distillery along the freeway. But the second part (time limit) is accurate because we WERE arriving just in time for the hourly tour...

| Nicole turned on the frozen windshield wipers and one of them flew off on the first stroke

I usually fly off on the first stroke too