Let Me Catch You Up....

Well.

Let me catch you up....

We were having a fabulous time in Truckee, getting excited for the race, and planning our route for the way back. We managed to find a reservation at the KOA in Salt Lake City for the July 4th weekend, which we knew the kids would love (swimming pool!) and had a lot of neat roadside attractions and state and national parks to check out on the northerly route home. We had plans to drive out of Truckee on June 30. 

Race day happened, we had a really fun time, M managed to finish the race, but became life-threateningly ill with rhabdomyolysis in the days that followed. Many terrible things happened over the past three weeks, but many amazing things happened as well. Family and friends rallied around us and helped in so many ways. We are now back in Pittsburgh and M is starting dialysis here, we're figuring out how to feed him a renal diet, getting used to living in a house again (it's so big! so many rooms! the toilet doesn't have to be manually emptied!) and in the process of meeting a new medical care team. 

I'm not going to lie, this kind of sucks. There's an afterglow of relief when your loved one recovers from a near-death experience. You can really only think about the next hour, sometimes the next minute, in the critical care unit. Making it through that feels triumphant. We were filled with gratitude and rightly so. But when that part was over and the dust settled, we had to deal with the messiness of an unexpected illness in a faraway city. Right now, the people are in Pittsburgh, but the cat is in California and the camper and car are in Nevada! Our kids experienced a lot of trauma from the way things happened and our separation. We're all alive, and M is feeling better every day. But you can be grateful and excited and frustrated and sad and angry all at the same time.

If you read this blog, you know we love road trips and outdoor adventure. This particular trip was many years in the making. Lots of saving and dreaming. So many times in the weeks leading up to Western States, we looked at each other and said, "This is it. We did it. Everything we said we wanted, we have and it's amazing." And it was, and nothing crappy that happened since then can erase the memories we made over the past few months. 

Stay tuned for more stories of the adventures that happened along the way. And I am so very grateful to everyone who reached out to us during a very dark hour. Thank you.