This is why we go
Ten years later, renewed again.
Our family just got back from Arizona, a quick warm-up from the deepest cold of a Minnesota winter.
A few days in the sun will never disappoint, even if there is the implicit understanding that traveling from cold to warm in January it is the falsest of false springs. It was 65 degrees when we left the airport in Arizona and minus-12 when we arrived back in the Twin Cities.
We don’t take winter trips like this very often because, well, they are a privilege and not a right. Schedules aligned. Flights to Phoenix were cheap. Our kids had been asking if we might do a winter getaway this year, and we decided that sure sounded nice. So we went for it.
It wasn’t until a few days before departure that it dawned on me that it had been almost exactly 10 years since I had been in Arizona.
That trip had served not just as warm-up but as a pivot point in my life.
On that previous trip, we were a family of three. Our first-born was 10 months old, and it was her first time on an airplane. We were nervous to travel with her, but we had to go.
The realities of first-time parenting were hitting us and testing us. Our daughter was (and is) wonderful, but there might not be a more significant life change than having your first child.
Adding significantly to the challenge of that time: I was freshly diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, having received the preliminary diagnosis in March of 2014 and the confirmation in September that year.
I was generally feeling OK, without anything beyond moderate symptoms, but I was still scared. MS is an unpredictable disease, and doctors can give you potential outcomes with few assurances. I didn’t know if my body was going to betray me and deteriorate rapidly, a scary proposition for a first-time dad in his late 30s.
And I was already starting to learn that winter would be my hardest season with MS. Between the cold and the short, dark days of the season, I really had to fight to conserve energy. I learned about Spoon Theory, and it sure applied to me, but I also hated the limitations MS inevitably placed on me.
The winter had been brutal during the time of my preliminary diagnosis, and my energy was noticeably sapped again as late 2014 prepared to give way to 2015.
My wife and I had both completed several marathons at that point, the last in 2012, and she asked me if we could try to do Grandma’s together in June of 2015. I was honest with her: I wasn’t sure my body could handle it.
Then we went to Arizona in early February and my answer changed.
I had been grinding out slow treadmill runs in Minnesota that winter, sometimes with heavy legs and almost always with decreased stamina.
In Arizona, with the dry air, perfect temperatures and sunshine, I suddenly felt like I had my body back. I remember flying through an 8-mile desert trail run, exhilarated by how fast I was going and how my body was responding.
I felt like myself again, a feeling I hadn’t had in months. We signed up for the marathon not long after we got back. I ran a personal best half-marathon as part of my training in May. And my wife and I ran Grandma’s together in June, her first since giving birth to our daughter and my first since diagnosis.
That trip to Arizona was a turning point — one that has receded in my memory over time but came rushing back this past week.
I was 38 then compared to 48 now. I don’t have any grand desire to sign up for a marathon, but I still run a few miles several times a week for exercise and pleasure.
When my wife asked me what I wanted to do in Arizona this time, I was honest: I knew we would be spending a lot of time doing family things, which I was looking forward to, but for myself all I wanted was at least one really good run.
On Friday morning, the time came. I left the hotel room around 7:30 a.m. at sunrise while everyone else was still asleep, gulped down an iced coffee and hit a trail.
It wasn’t an exceedingly long run, maybe 4.5 miles, but I got that feeling again. It was easily my best run in months.
I let my mind wander. Maybe I could do the Twin Cities 10 mile in October? I haven’t signed up for a race of any type since before COVID, but maybe now was the time.
It wandered some more to a recurring sporadic daydream about living somewhere warm, or at least retiring somewhere warm, or at least spending a lot of time somewhere warm. Maybe semi-retirement? Would I ever truly be happy being fully retired?
I started romanticizing about Flagstaff, the smaller mountain city two hours north of Phoenix that I visited and loved in 2005, another 10-year Arizona marker. Could we live there?
They are the kinds of thoughts you allow yourself on vacation, when you have the feeling and the head space. A million things will happen between now and a point 10 or 20 years into the future, but in the present there are daydreams that are not concerned with logistics or practicality.
They sure are a nice thing to hold onto.
I’m not the only daydreamer in the family. The one who was 10 months old on that last trip is now 10 years old and fast-approaching 11. I asked her what she thought of Arizona and she said, “I love it. Let’s move here.” I had to remind her that it is even more unbearably hot in Phoenix in summer than it is cold in Minnesota in winter, that again didn’t matter in the moment.
We also have an 8-year-old and a 5-year-old, of course, meaning this trip to Arizona was considerably different from the one in 2015.
My standard message to families who are thinking of having a second child or even a third is this: You’ve already done the hardest part. Going from 0 to 1 is the biggest deal. Going from 1 to 2 doesn’t double your work. You’re just used to it. Going from 2 to 3 adds some logistical challenges, but it’s nothing that can’t be solved with an extra chair or a vehicle with a third row of seats. By that point, you’re a veteran.
The biggest challenge on a vacation (or, more aptly, a trip) is that everyone’s life gets condensed into a smaller space and a shared schedule. The comforts of home are abandoned, and the individual has to become a member of a team.
To create a built-in victory with the kids on this trip, we booked our stay at an indoor waterpark hotel.
As soon as the water park opened the first morning we were there, I took the kids down. They squealed and howled as they moved around the various low-risk pools before fixing their collective gaze on the giant water slides.
We saw huge blue inner tubes sloshing down to the bottom of the widest slide.
Were there four people in there? Five?
Our middle child, the 8-year-old, had heretofore been very apprehensive about doing any slides. She was perfectly content in the pools and lazy river. But she saw that we could all be together and suddenly it was settled: We would do the big slide.
Up we went, seemingly a million stairs, but the perfect morning. It was barely crowded yet, the Thursday after a late Wednesday flight. Most kids in America were in school. Our kids had been allowed to miss one day (Friday was a day off anyway), and it was not lost on them that they were at a waterpark while almost all their friends were in the classroom.
We got to the top and had our pick of two different slides. We would learn later that we picked the more adventurous one, but in the moment it was just the one with an immediate opening. We took our place inside the tube and received basic instructions: Remain seated, hold onto the handles, stay in the tube until the attendant at the bottom pulled us to the steps.
The two youngest kids looked a little nervous, but with just the right mix of excitement. Then a conveyor belt pushed us forward and we were sent down fairly slowly … then moderately … then whoa it was picking up speed. There was more screaming (the good kind), a couple gasps when we reached the big drop near the end, then a dousing of water at the finish. We waited to be pulled to the steps and then all three kids immediately shouted: AGAIN!
Our 8-year-old kept hugging me and thanking me for bringing her. And she started daydreaming, too: Would it be possible to live at this waterpark hotel?
“I want to go down this waterslide every day for the rest of my life,” she said. “Could I do that?”
She reiterated that she is going to be rich when she grows up because she is planning to be a singer, actor, teacher and mom. I told her that she couldn’t go every day for the rest of her life, but that if she wanted to live at the hotel as an adult I wouldn’t stop her. And we could ride that same tube as much as she wanted (dozens of times, as it turned out) while we were there.
It would never be as fun as that first time, when we didn’t know what to expect, but it was always almost as fun. On the third day she said to me: “I just want to remember this day. And the day before it. And the day before it.”
And that’s why we were there. It was for all of us. It was for me. It was for my wife. It was definitely for the kids. It was to warm up. It was to live in that swirl of escape for a few days, to feel something different, to be rejuvenated.
The kids tested us with petty squabbles and countless requests, those moments when compromise just wasn’t possible and someone wasn’t going to get what they want. An alarm went off in our room at 6 a.m. one morning, and I still am not ready to forgive whoever stayed there before us and set it. Our flight home was delayed, we got in at a ridiculously late hour and, like I already said, it was inhumanely cold when we arrived back in reality.
But that’s not what I’m going to remember. That’s not why we were there.
It was for the silliness of the ridiculous way we remembered our room number (6191): Half a dozen, then a single person, then two more than the number of dwarves from Snow White, then another single person.
It was for the audacity of trying to hike up Camelback Mountain in slip-on Vans, sandals and Crocs, even after seeing the “extreme difficulty” sign, and seeing our kids go higher than anyone has the right to go in that footwear. (We’re bringing better shoes next time and going all the way to the top, they have decided).
It was for getting back to the bottom and finding a youngster turning over rocks looking for scorpions and suddenly deciding we needed to help him. I turned over a big one and thought I had found something cool, but he walked over and told me, “That’s just a cricket. Not even rare,” as two teens passed in the other direction and said, without missing a beat, “It’s not even rare, dude.” But we did find a scorpion, maybe against our better judgement, and our 5-year-old will never forget it.
It was for returning from one of countless outings, way too late as usual, with “Low” by Flo Rida on the radio. “Did he just say ‘gave that big booty a smack’?” the 5-year-old said, and now I know what quote I want on my parent of the year trophy. Everyone in the car insisted we listen to the whole song even though we were already back at the hotel.
It was for our 10-year-old, who I can still picture 10 years ago, being big enough and brave enough to do the vertical drop slide. She saw it the first day and said she wanted no part of it. She saw it again the next day and said she wanted to try it on the last day. Fifteen minutes later, she was on it, arms folded, the look in her eye that said, “I can do anything.”
It was for my wife taking a million pictures up in the mountains and at a butterfly exhibit, all of which I haven’t even seen yet. That’s how I know she is in her happy place, and it’s a great place.
It was for that morning run.
And it was for the wave pool at the water park, the place where the kids usually wanted to go when they were done with the slides for a while. It’s an artificial replication of a natural phenomenon, and I was letting that bother me until I just started riding the waves and enjoying it. They crash and fall, they’re not all the same size, and even if you catch it just right you had better be ready to turn around and stand up before the next one swallows you up.
I was feeling swallowed up before I went to Arizona 10 years ago.
This time, even if I was in a much better place going in, I’m grateful for the highs and the chance to dream a little all the same.