“I wanna sleep on the hard ground…in a pillow of blue bonnets (sand??) and a blanket made of stars” -Dixie Chicks
This weekend found us camping in Ciabets Flats in Cleveland National Forest in California, a small area outside San Diego. We had a grand ole time and Jess was finally about to make the hiking just fine without her knee destroying her. As an update on that, Jess ran in the Phoenix half-marathon in January. She made her best time since she ran her senior year in college (2 hours, 18 minutes). She had originally planned to use it as a training exercise for her first FULL marathon, potentially in March or April somewhere in California. Around mile 10 her left knee started causing her much pain, but assuming it was just from stress…she ran through it. She gave herself a few days to recover, then went back to training. Since then, she has not been able to run more than 2 miles without her knee causing her tremendous pain. Nor is she able to hike down sharp inclines. She has had x-rays and a MRI done, but nothing was found. Currently she is going to physical therapy to determine what can be done to help. It seems at least some improvement has been made. The hope is to start training for a triathalon! Well, that is Jess’s hope, and odds are she’ll be able to rope Neal into it eventually. 
For the camping trip, we started out with hiking down to some falls. We did roughly a 3.6 mile hike in total. We had planned to do much more, but our blue heeler baby girl, Jada, got a little over excited and tore up the pads on her paws. She couldn’t do much walking! So we finished up that hike, having to carry her some of the way! She is recovering nicely though, and is enjoying lounging on the couch and occasionally being carried outside and in. She does adore the attention. Because we couldn’t do any hiking on Sunday, either, we called it an early day and headed back home to have a nice lunch out and go swimming. All in all a good trip!
