A while back, Rebecca and I were talking about Michael Phelps. We all remember him as maybe the greatest Olympian of all time, with 23 gold medals and 28 medals overall. Rebecca remembered having a SERIOUS crush on him in 2008 during the Beijing Olympics, which, between her love of Heat-era Lebron and Beijing Michael Phelps, I can’t fault her in her taste in men. ;-)
I remember watching Michael Phelps even earlier though, during the 2004 Olympics in Athens, and that made me go down a memory lane.
In 2004, my mom, siblings, and I all took a several-week trip back to the US from Germany. This was a whirlwind tour of all over the US: we went to Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, and I think up to Michigan? I think the trip had something to do with the fact that we were now going to stay in Germany for another three years, but I didn’t know much about that as a 13-year old. All I knew is that we were going on a trip and it was going to be fun!
And it was! We did a lot of hiking all over the National Parks in the Southwest. I was always the one with the map, and I would figure out where the trails were going and where we were on them. Mama was the driver (obviously), and everyone else was along for the ride. We also had these funny names related to our personalities and the animals we thought of being out in nature. Mine had to do with being the guide for the trip, and Hannah’s was something about being an angry bear because of her prickly personality. :-) It was so much fun hiking around these parks, and looking back, Mama was amazing for taking four kids, including one under five, on all these hiking trips. We went to the Grand Canyon, which is my most poignant memory of having visited there, and I remember that at one point, we went into a ranger station. There was a woman there who had just started as a park ranger, and the older park rangers were saying how she had been bitten by her first snake the day before, which seemed like a rite of passage at the Grand Canyon among the rangers. I thought it was pretty epic when I overheard that story. :-)
We also had this really nice SUV that we drove around for most of the time. It was this bronze Buick, and it was incredibly cool in the Southwest summer. After we had walked out of the Phoenix airport and I felt the dry air suck all of the moisture out of my mouth, I appreciated the cool confines of that spacious SUV. It was a super reliable car across all our adventures that trip, and I have fond feelings towards Buicks because of it.
Also, the Olympics were on at night whenever we got back to our hotel. With five of us in the hotel room, I think Mark and Hannah were in one bed, Mama and Glo were in the other, and I slept on the floor. However, while we were watching the Olympics we would all cram into one of the beds together and watch. Michael Phelps was only 19, but he was shooting for Mark Spitz’s record of seven gold medals. Phelps had eight events, six individual and two relays, and there was a chance that he could do it. He won six gold medals and two bronze, so he fell short of his goal, but he was still amazing to watch. I also remember watching Paul Hamm, the American gymnast, compete in the all-around competition and come back from a fall on the vault to win the entire event. It was really awesome to see, and I remember when somebody told him that he had won, and he was in complete disbelief at that time.
That was also the first time I really met Grandad and Vanette. I knew they were my great-grandparents, and that they lived in New Mexico, but I didn’t know much about them. Their front room had lots of plants in it, and may have even had a water feature. They also had an original NES system that Mark and I spent a fair amount of time on playing video games. They were incredibly nice, and it was a good experience with extended family. While in Mexico, we also went to Carlsbad Caverns, which is a favorite of my mom’s, and got to see really awesome stalactites and stalagmites. My memory there was that it was so cool down in the caverns, whereas outside of the caves it was summer time in New Mexico, where it was pretty toasty, to say the least.
Because this entire trip came before phones and we had to carry actual cameras around to take pictures, I don’t know that there are very many of those pictures left, but I just felt so happy that entire time! It was a great trip, punctuated by lots of travel, the Olympics, and feeling really close as a family. Here’s to you Mama, creating yet another happy memory for me and our family. Happy birthday!
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