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Modern American Rule #1: The road is no place for a person who's paying attention.

Let along one who's on a bike. With a little baby in a trailer. But we did it anyway and enjoyed an evening of wine, women and song (more like beer, family, and jazz, but whatever) by bicycling down to the Chandler Jazz Festival way back when Chloe was just a little 8 month thing.

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I believe we can sum it up thus: "We're all here because we're not all there."

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So.  Yeah.

My old friends Russ and Andy dictate the Annual Adults Only Weekend in April.  They force us all to pass our spawns to the nearest grandparent willing to take them for a whole weekend, then we go drive some long, bumpy dirt road to a campsite.  We build a fire, fill the glasses, and talk about the old days and tell aggrandizingly sentimental stories about our children.

It might get loud.  It might get cold. We love it.  These are the pictures from our last outing in April 2009 that are suitable for the public.

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Just how do you tell a mere 2.5-year-old blond that she gets to go see a 700-year-old house carved into a hole of a limestone canyon wall and make it sound fun?

Can she possibly understand it? Not really. So here's what we did: "Chloe, do you want to go camping and throw little rocks into a river and climb on big rocks?"

And . . . she's . . . sold.

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We could have just driven down to any one of six or seven strip malls and found a Bed Bath and Beyond or something. But we wanted to buy something handcrafted and imperfect.  So we loaded the bikes and headed down the road for a two-day-and-three-night back road adventure through Tucson, Sonoita, Patagonia, and Nogales . . . just to buy a set of colorful mexican glasses and margarita pitcher south of the border. Chloe was learning to walk.  Labor Day 2008.

Our camp right on the edge of the beach north of town - Bahia de Los Angeles
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In search of the beautiful beaches enjoyed with the finest margaritas and the greasiest tacos that the Thousand-Mile-Peninsula has to offer.  And with a 6-months pregnant chick along for the ride, too.