Happy New Year! Our New Years resolution is to blog more! I'm sure that everyone is eagerly awaiting the exciting adventures of Claire and Jim in Big Bend: the beautiful hikes, the close calls with the mountain lions, the treks through the caves wearing our new headlamps that we got for Christmas, how we survived for 6 days with the nearest shower 14 miles away!!!

Well, we'll have to tell you some other time, because we didn't go. What we can tell you about is the virulent stomach virus that we both came down with the day that we were supposed to head out for Big Bend. It started with Jim, who spent eight hours or so with his head in the toilet, purging his body of Christmas dinner, and then Sprite. Then I started up 12 hours later, with violent chills and then sweats and then fainting on the bathroom floor.

So, we didn't really feel like camping after that and were glad that the sickness came BEFORE Big Bend and not after we got there. Fortunately, we were camped out at Jim's parents (unfortunately, they were also sick, along with our two neices and their parents...good thing there were a lot of bathrooms around). We had lots of Sprite and crackers and then, when we felt well enough, we went to Louisiana to see my parents. Instead of spending the night under the stars in Big Bend, we slept in my lumpy, saggy old bed and we wore our headlamps out into the pecan grove to watch shooting stars and to listen to owls and bats and coyotes. It wasn't Big Bend, but we still had a great vacation.