TOMILY: Birthday Camping

To celebrate Em's 26th bday we went camping in the Santa Ritas. This is the range to the south of Tucson. The base of the range is 2000 feet higher than Tucson, and this is evident in the friendlier flora of the area relative to the angry desert succulents. We've been camping together a few times with variable success. We have the goal to camp more and become more efficiant with it (read: stop forgetting things like tent poles...).

Our first camping trip together, pry 3 years ago... hopefully our last without tent poles.

Of course, we're both too tall to fit in the back of Troop-Troop.

This trip was a great success. We made it to the campground in time to get the last spot, get the tent set up, fire lit, and dinner cooking with a some dusk. Our smores were delicious. It is so dark out here, and the stargazing is amazing. So good in fact that there is an observatory on the next mountain over. When we moved here our landlord told us the there aren't many streetlights in Tucson because of all the observatories nearby. Cool. We are at the stage in our lives where it's time to replace our aging handmedown camping equipment. Everything works... but our sleeping bags are almost as old as we are... I got Em a new bag and pad for her bday, and she slept like a dream. In the morning we had coffee and headed out for a hike.

I've been hiking down here a few times without Em, once to the top of Mt. Wrightson; it's an amazing area. Fifty feet from our campsite there was a trail head that made a 6 mile loop up to a cool springs and back. This was a tough little hike. The way up was a rocky double track that was super steep. It had some awesome boulders right off the trail. I don't know much about bouldering, but it looks like fun so we checked it out.

In other news, we made the best ice cream in the history of the world. We both love cookie dough but sometimes wish the choclate chips weren't all crunchy in there. So we made some cookie dough sans chocolate chips. Don't get us wrong, we love chocholate but melty chocolate like in hot cookies or really good dark choclate at room temp... So we decided to add the chocolate in the form of ganache. So it's vanilla icecream with plain cookie dough and chocolate ganache folded into it. It's as dangerous as it is delicious.

Before: