Climbing the Camel

No, no, no.  That is not a euphemism for some weird bedroom trick I don’t even know about.  Get your mind out of the gutter, people.

No, really, let’s talk seriously.

When you have a 2 year old and a newborn, I think a really fun thing to do is quit your jobs.

Okay, it wasn’t that fun, but that’s what we did.  My baby was two months old, and hey, it seemed like a good idea.  Sort of.

That was eleven years ago.

Fortunately, we were still able to eat and send our children to school as they grew.  Life has been good that way.  Also, the company my husband started after quitting his “real” job turned out to be a real company itself, with lots of employees, and photocopiers, and even conference calls.  It’s a nice ending to the story, I think.  Much nicer than, “It didn’t work out and we were hungry, so we went crawling back.”  That would’ve been tough.  And I’m sure this isn’t really the ending, but it’s been an interesting ride so far.

We sold the company a few years ago and everything was recently finalized.  To celebrate, we flew west to thank the investors who helped us get this thing off the ground.  The bonus:  they are fun, and funny, guys, not at all the stodgy-old Wall Street types you might expect investors to be.  Nope, these were some farm boys from Utah who worked hard and done good.  Real good.  They kept us laughing all night.

And when we weren’t eating swanky dinners with funny, smart, grown-up farm boys turned businessmen, we enjoyed our lovely hotel, and its fantastic spa.

We didn’t want to be those spa-like people, though, who forget where they came from, so we decided to keep things real with a little activity.  A walk, maybe?   Or how about a hike?  2700 ft up Camelback Mountain?

See that tall peak on the left?  That’s where we were headed.  We climbed over rock after rock after rock.

We passed 150 year old saguaros and cool-looking trees,

took a break in this little cave,

and loved the view from the top.

We especially enjoyed gawking at the incredible homes around the mountain.  How about this one?  Just a small summer place, I’m sure.
We came back to much colder temperatures, but, thankfully, we also have sunshine.  And in March, that is a very good thing.
Any other Camelback hikers out there?  Woot!

One thought on “Climbing the Camel

  1. Hey, I know that hotel! It's been eons since I've been to Phoenix, but as soon as I saw the pic I got the connection..climbing the camel 🙂

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