Haley

At age 15, Haley noticed small dots and bruises on her body. Suddenly her life changed forever when she learned that she had acute lymphoblastic leukemia. She endured grueling treatments resulting in fatigue, pain, nausea and hair loss. At one point, Haley developed a clot in her brain causing terrifying speech and mobility difficulties.
Wishes & More® granted Haley her dream vacation, a trip for her family to explore “Out West.” Highlights from their trip included zip lining, floating in the Great Salt Lake and white water rafting. Her thank you letter describes each activity and showcases her love of unique experiences and time spent with family. We were honored to provide this wish for this special young lady. “Dear Wishes and More, There is no way I could ever thank you enough for making my wish happen! It was one of the best experiences have ever had. Our first stop was in Nebraska where we stayed the night after driving all day, there wasn’t much to do there but swim in the hotel pool, our next stop was in Colorado, that night we swam as well, but it was pretty neat because the pool was outside covered by a dome; not to mention it stormed so you could see the pouring rain pound the clear dome windows! The next day we went to soaring tree top adventures. This was personally my favorite part of the trip. The staff there was amazing! They learned everyone’s name within the first hour we got there! We took a two hour train ride to the course in a real steam engine! The view on the way there was beautiful, with cliffs dropping and rising on all sides of the train! When we actually started the course there were five tiny lines to warm you up and then you were hoisted up over 100 feet in a helicopter hoist! In the middle of the day we got snacks and lunch, we ate in the trees and the chefs there are incredible and cater to your every need. You even got a free water bottle. There were over 30 lines and one was over 1400 feet long! It’s the biggest zip line course in the world. (it’s easy you just sit in the harness and do tricks or whatever, there are no breaks or anything you need to worry about) And I would highly recommend it to and people that don’t know what to do with their wish. The next day we went to Mesa Verde, and man was it cool. You got to walk around all the houses and we even took a tour going through one! The day after that we visited arches and it was 107 degrees outside!! We hiked over a mile and it’s a good thing we all soaked our shirts in the fountain before we started walking otherwise that hike would have been miserable! The arches were amazing themselves though! We went to one in the middle of to cliffs and it was nice and cold, and the whole floor was sand so that was pretty awesome. We went into Utah after that and the first thing we did is float in the great salt lake. Once you get past all the brine flies it awesome, the feeling of floating without a tube is incredible.. I didn’t expect it at all, we just had to make sure not to splash or touch our eyes.. The next day we swam as well, in natural springs stocked with salt water fish, this was another one of my favorite days. The man gave us lettuce and we got to feed the colorful fish, they swam right up to you and made a weird munch sound! There was a tunnel you swam through to get to a connected spring and that one had things like stingrays and sharks and this other huge type of fish, what we did with those was floated in the water and cuz we were snorkeling and couldn’t go deep to see them the guy just threw their dinner on top of us and they ate all around us which was also really neat! We didn’t see any sharks but a stingray surfaced! Then the guy told us where to find hot springs you could swim in so we drove off to find them. They were kind of expensive so we ended up going down a river instead. You floated down in tubes and went down multiple waterfalls, many of my family members got hurt but we decided it was worth it and went again! The next few days we went to Yellowstone and saw old faithful and all the hot springs and stuff, we also white water rafted that was very neat and exciting. Then we finished the vacation with glacier and that was by far the prettiest place we went. We basically just hiked and looked at wild life (we saw elk, goats and grizzly bears), but we did white water raft again and horseback ride to the top of a mountain! The Indians that led us on the horses were such great people! Then we went home. Sorry I kinda wrote a book about it but I just wanted to let you all know what we did and how great it was, there are some pictures below too and yeah we just had a great time. Like I said before we just can’t thank you enough for making this happen! THANK YOU. ~Haley” Thanks especially to Steve & Charlotte Garske for sponsoring this wish for Haley!