We are Sane,

The Parents - Kelly and James

James & Kelly met in Flagstaff in 1995 while she was a student at NAU and he was working at an observatory.  He grew up in the Foreign Service, living in Japan, Poland, and Cyprus, while she was an avid outdoor lover, backpacking the Grand Canyon rim-to-rim-to-rim multiple times.  Their first date was in James' 1973 Land-Rover.  When Kelly looked miserable on her first bouncy off-pavement trip in it, James decided to let her drive, and she absolutely fell in love.  They enjoyed many backpacking and car camping trips all over the Four-Corners area in that Rover, but their conversion from backpacker to overlander occurred while cooking their ramen noodles at the campground at Canyon de Chelley National Monument.  The smell of a neighboring camper's steaks proved too much.  They looked at each other, an decided to go to the grocery store in Chinle to buy all the fixin's for a real meal.  After that, the backpacking gear was reserved for backpacking trips, and the Rover trips would include such luxuries as a cooler full of food and drink, chairs, and a tent you can actually stand up in.  Their daughter Grace came along in 2001, and she was taken camping to more and more remote locations just in her first year.  In her 4th year they purchased a 1968 Land Rover Dormobile, which has logged thousands of miles in seven states and taught a lot about packing everything a family needs and nothing it doesn't on an extended trip.  They have lost count of how many nights they have spent away from home this year, and plan to take a 10 week overland trip to Central America and back in 2015.  

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