Dear fellow glamper,

This year our family had to deal with the biggest challenge we’ve ever had: TJ deployed for six months.  Now we are not strangers to deployments, this was his fifth (our fourth since we’ve been married) but it was the first one we experienced as a family of four and the first one in which the kids understood their father was gone.  And it was a LONG six months… for everyone.  

Now every “reintegration” has its challenges, and every family knows what works best for them.  Something that always carries us through these deployments is planning a special trip once TJ comes home; and this year we picked New Mexico.  For us, family adventures are when we are at our best –as a family and as individuals.  While TJ was gone, we talked endlessly about this trip: what we would do, where we should stay, what improvements did we want to make to Honeysuckle Manor and our tow vehicle, and it was such a nice way to escape whatever was happening that day, thousands of miles apart, something could do together.  Neither TJ nor I had ever been to New Mexico before, and it just sounded like a place we would fall in love with, and we did.  Plus, endless quantities of green chile can kick months spent single parenting out of my head.

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