In the Desert – The true meaning of dryland

8, April, 2006
Saturday, 1:20 Mountain/ 3:20 p.m.

Ok, I’m really tired, it’s 1:20 in the afternoon and everybody else is asleep. Only my dad, who’s driving, and me are awake. I would be sleeping but all the beds are full. Everybody’s exhausted. Let me tell you why.
I didn’t have time to blog yesterday ‘cause we were so busy. We started out the morning at the White Sands National Monument where we saw the world’s largest 100% gypsum sand dunes. We figured that after two hours at the dunes, everybody would be ready to go. We were wrong.
We spent at least five hours at the dunes, probably more. Katty loved them. She’d run up to the top of one “Awesome!” she would cry. Then, running up to the top of the next one she’d yell “ Wow, ‘dis is weally awesome!” She ran from one dune to the next, occasionally finding some rock hard packed sand, which she would chuck at us.
Some of the dunes were huge, and very steep on one or both of the sides. Some of the side literally dropped straight down. These are the ones we played King of the Hill, rolled down, ran up, did somersaults down, ran up, dived down, ran up, wrestled on, and ran up again. We later found out that you could swim down the dunes (See, even if I don’t have a pool to work out in, I’ll figure somethin’ out:) but it was very difficult.
On one of the dunes, I found a bleached earless lizard. He was about the size of your thumb, blending perfectly with the extremely white sand. Katty was fascinated with him, holding him saying “Let’s call ‘im Fwank (Frank)”. Kinda random. When she was sitting there holding him, and we were all studying him, Katty suddenly dropped him, and he ran up her shorts! Darby, Tatum, and my mother started screaming at the top of their lungs (it took awhile for it to register in my brain exactly what happened so I wasn’t yelling) and running off. Katty, perfectly calm in the midst of chaos, just sat there while I fished Fwank out of her shorts. We then let Fwank Peanutbutter (Katty dubbed the last name upon him shortly after the pant’s incident) go back home.
We played for hours more, and once we got back to the RV my whole legs were sore. It takes a lot of muscle to climb up hundreds of sand dunes.
We arrived half an hour later at Rockhound State park, where we cooked dinner and my mom and I climbed up one of the mountains (in Indiana it’s a mountain, there it was a hill).
So I’m sitting here a day after one of the hardest dryland workout I’ve ever experienced sore to the bone in my legs. I’ll update all ya’ll tonight on what happened today.

Cul8r,
Morgan