Packing for Adventure

Pack Light. Travel Far.

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  • 10 Ideas for Christmas Gifts for your Wife She’s Guaranteed to LOVE! 2025 Edition

    Women can be elusive when it comes to gift giving, but here are ten great ideas that can’t go wrong!

    Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links. If you click and make a purchase, I may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thanks for supporting my blog!

    For Your Wife Who:

    Loves to feel warm and cozy

    This heated blanket is sure to make her happy! I never knew how much I loved being wrapped up in an electric blanket until my husband got this for me as a gift a few years ago.

    Loves her big eyelashes and restful sleep

    This 2-pack of contoured sleep masks is perfect for restful sleep while also protecting those lovely lashes.

    Needs some time for destressing

    Diamond Art is a great way for your wife to take time for herself and build something beautiful.

    Or for a more direct approach to relaxation, this Spa Day gift package is a great pick.

    Is tired of a messy house

    As part of the gift, it would be prudent to offer to do the cleaning yourself for a month, otherwise you may get in trouble here. Though I have personally requested these items as gifts from my husband!

    This steam mop makes cleaning a sticky floor much easier. The heat from the steam wipes away dirt and grime with much less elbow grease.

    Same for this spinning scrubber, it’ll make deep cleaning fun!

    Loves to read

    This bookshelf is an adorable way to display your favorite books – your wife will love it in her book nook!

    Loves to host dinner

    Help your wife keep food warm with this ingenious food warming mat, perfect for hosting!

    Is sentimental

    This kissing couple statue is sure to make her swoon. A perfect gift to show your love.

    Or this sentimental message candle can do the trick. Show your love with the scent and the loving messaging!

  • Pizza and Woodworking

    Daily writing prompt
    What are you doing this evening?
    View all responses

    Eating pizza of course! Every Friday night is Pizza Night. It was a contract I apparently signed in blood when me and Chris first got married.

    Afterwards, we’ll probably get in bed early, it’s been a loooooong week and we’ve got a busy weekend ahead! Chris owns a woodworking shop called Katalox Woodshop. It keeps him pretty busy on the weekends!

    What is everyone else up to?

  • Hiking by the Light of a Full Moon

    Hiking by the Light of a Full Moon

    Daily writing prompt
    How do you relax?
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    I apparently don’t know how to relax. When we go on trips, we are constantly moving. We can’t sit at a beach, we gotta be exploring everything everywhere!

    I particularly love hiking. Though, let’s be clear, I LOVE sleeping. I could nap for hours if I had the time. And no one has ever accused me of being a morning person.

    A friend of mine recently mentioned in passing that she had joined a hiking group with women who go hike to the flagpole on the nearby mountain twice a week at 5:30 AM. I told her she was crazy.

    But for whatever reason, the idea of hiking at 5:30 AM nagged at me for a bit and I decided to join them one day a few weeks ago.

    This hike is only 0.7 miles to the top, but it is 804 feet in elevation, and it is RELENTLESS. It is STEEP. It’s a good thing it’s dark at 5:30 AM, because otherwise maybe we’d be able to actually see how steep it is and turn around and go back to bed!

    I ended up loving this hike, and I loved how I felt afterwards. I’ve been doing it twice a week ever since – sometimes with the other women, and sometimes by myself. Last time I went by myself, it was by the light of the full moon, so I didn’t need my headlamps.

    It was indescribably peaceful hiking by the light of moon. The hike itself is quite difficult, but I loved every second of it. As I hiked down, the sun slowly started rising and I was able to greet the day.

    Then I come home and have a HOT shower before Chris and the kids have gotten out of bed. It’s a wonderful jumpstart to the day.

    I cannot adequately explain to a stranger how uncharacteristic this behavior is for me – but I plan to continue.

    Could I possibly become a morning person after all these years??

  • Run 3 Miles to Hike 10

    Run 3 Miles to Hike 10

    Daily writing prompt
    How often do you walk or run?
    View all responses

    I do some sort of walking or running almost every single day. Physical fitness is very important to me, though I’m no body builder haha!

    I just really love traveling and the outdoors, and I in particular love hiking. I hike as often as I can given my busy home and work schedule. Since snow kinda kills my hiking buzz in the winter, I have to stay in shape for hiking by running in the winter.

    Though again, I love the outdoors. I really hate running on a treadmill, so running in the winter is more of a chore than I’d like. In order to stay motivated, I have to sign myself up for races.

    To prep for my trip to the Grand Canyon, I did a winter running series last year. This involved running 4 races in the winter, all of them between February and April. It started with a 5K, then a 10K, then a 10-mile hike, and then a half marathon. Many people used this race series as a way to train for a marathon in May, though I just did another half marathon in May.

    I am NOT GOOD at running. I’ve been doing these races for years, and I never seem to get any better!

    So this winter race series is pretty small – it’s mostly super athletic people who are crazy enough to pay to run in the snow in the bleak winter. And me.

    What I love about participating in big marathon races is that if I do a half marathon, I finish ahead of hundreds of people! Never mind that they are running 26 miles instead of my 13…

    So participating in this winter race series was a huge blow to my ego since each individual race was just a single event. I was in the bottom 3 for the 5K, 10K, and 10-mile races. As for the first half marathon, that was a new low. When I made it to mile 10.5 ish, a woman caught up to me holding a flag and she asked me if I was a race participant. Come to find out, she was the race sweeper. So basically it was her job to “sweep up” the dregs of the race participants. She said that she had been running with two race participants who dropped out at mile 7 ish and she’d been running as fast as she could to make it to the end of the race – until she caught up to me.

    At this point, I was feeling pretty sluggish and my legs were hurtin. Once I found out she was the sweeper, I started walking! She was super nice and chatted with me the whole time. She kept saying stuff like “if we run at a 10-minute pace, we can finish by 11:00!” She was so nice, and I didn’t have the heart to tell her that on my BEST DAY, when I haven’t already run 10 miles, my max speed is a 12-minute mile!

    The best part? Chris and the kids were at the finish line waiting for my victorious end of the race. They didn’t come until about 15 minutes before I told them to expect me to finish, and by that point, most participants were long finished. So when we cross the finish line, my 5-year-old daughter ran up to me shouting about how proud she was of me for WINNING THE RACE! Hahahaha since they hadn’t seen anyone else cross the finish line!

    Since the second half marathon I did was a much larger event, I ran the race at the same time as marathoners, so crossing the finish line was much less embarassing.

    All that being said, I run to stay in shape for hiking. I figure if I can run 3 miles, I can probably hike 10!

  • Pizza and Ice Cream: Dream Team

    Daily writing prompt
    What are your favorite types of foods?
    View all responses

    My favorite food is ICE CREAM!

    There’s nothing better! I could eat it every day and never get sick of it.

    Obvs not all ice cream is created equal – I love the super high milkfat kind the most, but I probably wouldn’t say no to lesser ice cream under the right circumstances.

    Chris, on the other hand, is obsessed with PIZZA!

    We did a cross-country pizza crawl for our 10-year anniversary and we loved it! It was such a great adventure full of good food! I always love when we can combine both of our favorite foods in a single experience, like what we were able to do in Brooklyn.

    What better way is there to bring two people together than sharing pizza and ice cream?

  • You Spin Me Right Round Baby Right Round

    Daily writing prompt
    What brings a tear of joy to your eye?
    View all responses

    This is a little embarrassing, but the last time I felt joy to the point of a tear coming to my eye was maybe a week or two ago. My kids like to have “dance parties.” It’s been a way in the past for me to keep them active mid-winter when it’s too dark and cold to play outside, so we pick out some upbeat song for them to dance to on YouTube. Some of our favorites are Cotton-Eye Joe, Scatman, Who Let the Dogs Out, I Like to Move It Move It, you know the kind.

    A week or so ago as they were having one of these dance parties, a song came to mind that I hadn’t heard for a while and I played it for them. It’s the opening song to the Adam Sandler movie “The Wedding Singer.”

    I LOVED that movie. It might be the first movie I ever owned on DVD (first VHS I owned was Men in Black).

    That first song where Adam Sandler and his band sing “You Spin Me Round” is so fun and upbeat and it just really gets you feeling happy – but Adam Sander’s version in particular.

    When it started playing, I was so excited to hear it that my eyes literally filled with water.

    Another time was when I was in Florence, Italy. We stepped into the Accademia to see the David by Michelangelo. I never would have guessed that I would have the reaction that I did. I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed! Chris was baffled by my reaction hahaha! I knew I was an art lover, but seeing it in person was just so breathtaking!

  • The VHS Generation

    Daily writing prompt
    What TV shows did you watch as a kid?
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    I grew up in the days of VHS. A lot of the videos I watched as a kid were tv shows or movies that were very poorly recorded from live tv. If you were diligent, you could manage to record a movie from tv without commercials if you were poised and ready to stop and start recording every time there was a commercial break. Our home recording of “The Princess Bride” had a commercial break at the exact moment Westley jumps into the quicksand to save Buttercup. We’d try to hold our breath for the whole commercial break to see if we would have survived the quicksand.

    Kids these days will never understand the struggle!

    I never got to watch Nickelodeon except for the rare circumstances in which my family was staying in a motel while road tripping to take pictures of graveyards (I’m serious. My dad is an OG lover of genealogy- pre 23andme and ancestry.com days). I was so jealous of the “rich” kids who had cable!

    One of my favorite poorly recorded home videos was Donald Duck, specifically the one where he visits the Grand Canyon. I also LOVED the Maurice Sendak videos, especially the super bizarre “In the Night Kitchen.”

    But my favorite had to be “Animaniacs.” Even as an adult I love it and make sure to play clips of it to my kids. This show had the perfect blend of silliness and learning. What better way to learn all the countries than by hearing Yakko’s World? Wakko teaches us all the state capitals as a Jeopardy-like game contestant. I also learned about Michelangelo and Mozart through the silly antics of the Animaniacs.

    Kids today have endless streaming libraries. They’ll never know the panic of yelling “Don’t record over that!” They’ll never have the reflexes required to stop and start recording. I didn’t have Nickelodeon, but I wouldn’t trade my memories of grainy home videos for anything.

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  • A Night Owl Catching the Sunrise

    Daily writing prompt
    What’s your favorite time of day?
    View all responses

    I am inherently a night owl.

    When I was a kid, my parents gave up on putting me to bed at bedtime – as long as I was quiet. I’d sneak behind the couch to watch David Letterman’s Top Ten. Despite the fact that I was too young to understand the vast majority of the punchlines, I was fascinated by the Top Ten list.

    This habit of staying up late has lasted my whole life. I remember reading Harry Potter when each new book came out all hours of the night, finally going to bed at 4:00 AM and then waking up a few hours later to go to school.

    For some reason, I was always tired at school…

    As an adult this behavior has not aged well. I am NOT a morning person, but the kids expect morning snuggles and breakfast, and people at work keep adding me to meetings at ungodly hours despite the fact that I keep telling people I’m no good until 10:00 AM.

    I have recently decided that if I wish to continue in my goal of continual progress, I will need to start waking up earlier than has been previously precedented.

    For the last few weeks, me and my 5-year-old daughter have been waking up a half hour before work starts to jog an apple to the horse down the street. We’ve only done this for the last 3-4 weeks and I’ve noticed that because of my earlier start time, I’m getting more done at work and earlier than ever before.

    I will likely never love the morning time, unless I am doing a hike. For some reason my hatred for morning dissipates if I am in nature. I may never wake up bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, and I doubt I’ll ever be the kind of person who is chipper for morning scrum. But I’m learning that waking up earlier creates a ripple effect of energy, focus, and even sweet moments with my daughter. While the night will always feel like home to me, I’m starting to see that mornings can hold their own kind of magic.

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  • Journey to Phantom Ranch: Two Years in the Making

    Daily writing prompt
    Tell us about the last thing you got excited about.
    View all responses

    Staying at the Phantom Ranch at Grand Canyon National Park is the most recent thing I’ve done that got me all giddy. I love travel, nature, and National Parks. I had never been to the Grand Canyon before this recent trip, and I’d kind of held off on visiting as I wanted to ensure my trip was as epic as I fantasized. That meant I REALLY REALLY REALLY wanted to stay the night at the Phantom Ranch.

    It took me close to 2 years to get a reservation and I spent at least a year prepping physically for the hike.

    I was able to complete this exciting trip in June 2025, and it definitely lived up to my dreams. It is very unfortunate that wildfires have raged at the Grand Canyon since July 2025. I am so grateful that I had a chance to enjoy an unforgettable experience, and I look forward to the day that everything in the Park reopens and people are able to enjoy it again.

    When that day comes, I hope people can use my experience to help prepare for their own once-in-a-lifetime adventure. Trust me, it’s worth the wait.

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  • Pursuit of Happiness (and Travel)

    Daily writing prompt
    What motivates you?
    View all responses

    I am motivated by the same thing everyone is motivated by- the pursuit of happiness.

    I am luckier than most. I have a wonderful husband, children, and dogs that fill my heart to swelling every day. We are able to provide our family with a stable home and all our physical needs are met.

    With nothing to worry about physically, the mind tends to wander and that’s where mental health comes in.

    I’ve heard it said that people in third-world countries do not experience mental health issues as much. I guess it’s because they spend too much time worrying about putting food on the table. I’ve heard the same thing about our ancestors.

    We live in a day and age where our worries are not life or death, but instead emotional or maybe spiritual.

    I am truly grateful that my biggest problems in life are non-physical. The time my ancestors spent farming and building society is time that I spend wondering what I can do to increase the happiness of myself and my family. Everything I do is with the ultimate goal of increased happiness.

    What exactly happiness translates to I can’t say for sure, but at the top of the list is quality time with those I love most.

    Long story short, I guess you could say I’m motivated by money. Who isn’t? I can spend quality time with my family by hiking in our local mountains, having a picnic in our backyard, or visiting a local splash pad- but what I REALLY want is to see the world!

    So until airfare and accommodation for a family of four starts to grow on trees, you can bet I’ll stay motivated to work.

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