miura-adventure.comLife should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather skid in broadside, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "WOW, WHAT A RIDE!!!!"

After oh so much work, we finally hit the road on June 15, fittingly Father’s Day, at 11:45AM. I can’t really explain the feeling of driving down Blaze Trail with our house in the background. Surreal is the word that comes to mind. We had no reservations for our first night but knew we wanted to head north, away from the heat. We ended up in a funky little campground in Flagstaff which was 30 degrees cooler than Anthem. While we initially thought we would just hang out there for a couple days, we ended up staying there for five days, just so we could recover from one the most intense months of our lives.

I don’t ever recall being as tired as I was that first night. At about 6PM, I began fantasizing about drifting to sleep in my new bed. We had been sleeping on cots in our bedroom in Anthem for some time (after giving away our bed) so our new “sleep number” beds seemed like a mirage in the desert. As I laid down on my wonderful new bed, it felt like a ZERO on the scale of 5 to 100 (in sleep number terms). We clicked the little technical device, punching in 100 in the hopes it would pump up. Nothing. Oh no. Not tonight! Ken’s side was a plateau and mine a valley. Ken graciously offered to sleep on Lauren’s bed in the “living room” while Lauren slept on the valley and I on the plateau. The next day, we figured out that Lauren’s sleepover included a bit of jumping on our poor bed so they had managed to break apart two parts of the mattress which Ken fixed with some gorilla glue and the girls hair straightened the next day. In the meantime, the company sent us a whole new mattress so if we ever encounter this problem again, it will be solved!

Meanwhile, our two year old golden retriever, Hobie, wasn’t too keen on this whole “adventure idea”. You could tell he was in a funk and missed his backyard and all his bunny friends. We took him on a walk and he encountered his first squirrel. Simply a bunny with a big tail in his eyes. When the squirrel ran up the tree, Hobie refused to leave the tree as he had never seen a bunny do such a thing in Arizona. Hobie has come around and is now back to his old happy self. He had an encounter with a heard of cows as well as horses and thinks this is all pretty cool. Not to mention he sleeps near the same level as all the kids so he gets to lick them each morning as a wake up call.