Our departure date is approaching fast! That means I only have a few days to tell you, Reader, what our plans and goals are so that you can hold us to them!

While we are in Arizona, we plan to keep working Central Time hours. Both M and I tend to keep a 7AM to 4PM schedule at our jobs. Although this will mean logging on at 5AM for the majority of the trip, it also means that we will be done working by 2PM every day, which is definitely a fair trade. We plan to do local hikes in the evenings on weekdays and make longer trips on the weekends. Right now we only have four vacation days scheduled during our trip, as we want to try and save some of those for important things that are happening later in the year. We do have two more floating vacation days that we can take if we need them, but we’re kind of hoping we don’t have to. We also purchased the Arizona state parks pass for 2021, so we’ll really need to get after it if we want to make that purchase worthwhile.

We have three main goals for our trip:

1. Go for a hike or walk every day (excluding travel days). What constitutes a walk vs a hike, you ask? Most people think it has to do with the terrain, but it is actually much simpler than that. It is a walk if I have my tennis shoes on, it is a hike if I have my hiking boots on, it is nothing if I have my Birkenstocks on. For the hike or walk to count for the sake of this exercise, we must also be hitting at least 10,000 steps every day as well. If we hit 9,900 steps in a day, no dice.
2. Play each one of our games once a week. That’s right, Internet, we’re Games People^TM in addition to Parks People^TM. Through the many long months of this pandemic, we have tried seemingly every two-person game on Planet Earth, and we have come away with clear favorites. Of our favorite two-person games, only three travel well, so we set out on the trip toting Morels, Hive, and a deck of cards for gin rummy. The reason we want to include a goal to play games on our trip is to break up the routine of work, hike, Netflix, sleep that we think we could fall into pretty easily. The games give us something else to focus on, plus they’re fun.
3. Dry March. This one is pretty simple, but we don’t want to drink any alcohol for a month. We won’t be going to any bars or breweries or anything once we hit AZ, so if we wanted alcohol, we’d have to buy it to keep around the Airbnb. We figured we might as well save the money and calories and just skip the casual beers. I’m not a big drinker to begin with so this isn’t a huge sacrifice, but I will participate in solidarity.