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I had a great time on our week-long trip Christmas week. We started the week with a challenging hike at Picacho Peak and camped there the first night. We spent the next three nights camping at Cochise Stronghold. Christmas Eve we had a good meeting followed by ‘getting into the Christmas spirit’ with our own rendition of The Twelve Days of Christmas, campfire games, and a secret Santa/white elephant. Christmas day was my favorite day of the trip. We each opened a gift from our families, followed by an epic boulder scramble hike. A few of us did a polar dip (Swimming in cold water) under some of the larger boulders. When we got near the tip we shared on the topic of our experiences of past holidays, how it feels to be in rehab on Christmas, and our hopes for what future holidays will be like. We ended the day with an awesome dinner of steak with mushrooms, onions, bell peppers, and garlic – then meditated before bed.
December 26th, we went on a short and snowy hike near Tucson. We had a pretty epic snowball fight. The hike was cut a bit short because of the amount of snow, so we went to Tombstone, Az which was pretty cool for me. I remember watching the movie ‘Tombstone’ with my dad growing up multiple times, so I was thinking of him. I got him a coffee mug with the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday on it and will send it to him this week. We also went to a theater to see a live historic reenactment gunfight show of some of the events that have occurred in tombstone.
A few of us got in some good workouts using boulders for curls, squats, and shoulder presses, tree branches for pullups, and did pushups using a deck of cards to determine how many we needed to do. Missing out on lifting weights is the one thing I don’t like about being on the hiking trips.
On the 27th we went on a hike at the Canyon Nature Preserve, where I learned about some different birds in the area. The hike was right near the Mexico border. Later that day we went to Bisbee, Arizona where we stayed at the Shady dell, an Airstream RV park with a 60’s theme. It was really cool. We had old vinyl record players and black and white TV’s which gave us old music and movies to watch. It also had an old looking diner, an outdoor theater, and some 60’s cars, vans and trucks. That night we took an historic ghost tour of Bisbee. We did not see any ghosts, but we learned the history of Bisbee and ghost stories there – all of which were very anecdotal. I was not convinced.
Friday, we started back to Flagstaff. We had our last meal at an in-n out which being from California was amazing. I was super grateful to spend the week with my new brothers and had a fantastic week.
Client Journal – Justin