Monday, June 20, 2005

I'm Back

After a much needed vacation I am back at work. Got plenty of sun and pool time in AZ and it was nice to catch up with Jason’s family. We spent a couple of days (Tuesday and Wednesday) in Scottsdale, which was really kind of dull IMO. Kind of like a Florida retirement community minus the humidity and ocean and much hotter. There were lots of nice quaint art and jewelry galleries there, but of course all ridiculously out of my price range. However, the Hilton that Jason’s mom was kind enough to put us up in is possibly the nicest hotel/resort I’ve ever stayed at and the pool there was awesome. I even made use of the nice fitness center and worked out. After Jason’s brother-in-law was able to fly in from the east coast and join us we headed up to Sedona. It was much cooler there and the drive was beautiful! There were rolling hills and many saguaro cacti.

We stopped along the way to visit Montezuma Castle, which was pretty cool but poorly named since it’s not really a castle and the structures were built before the Aztec emperor Montezuma was even born. The structures there were inhabited by the Sinagua (meaning “without water”) people that occupied an area between Flagstaff and Phoenix, Arizona between 500 and 1300 AD. Their culture was a mixture of Hohokam, Anasazi and Mogollon influences (see I paid attention at the Visitors’ Center and actually learned something on vacation! Imagine that).

This was my first time in Sedona and I was floored by all the beautiful red-rock formations there. If you haven’t been, you should go sometime. The Hilton we stayed at there was also very nice. On Friday we took a drive up to Flagstaff through the Oak Creek area of Coconino National Forest which was stunning. Great views and lots of clean air and wind up there in them mountains. Unfortunately we didn’t really plan or research anything in Flagstaff, so if there was anything all that interesting there we missed it. It did look like a pretty cool little hippy-hang-out kind of town. The public library looked very nice and there were the usual quaint little touristy shops.

Saturday we went to Tlaquepaque in Sedona, which is a charming little area filled with shops that have nice art and fancy expensive stuff. We spent our last night dining at the Cowboy Club in honor of Fathers Day. I had some excellent roasted vegetable lasagna and everyone else enjoyed big hunks of cow and pig. Yum! Jason and I enjoyed tall glasses of delicious Nut Brown Ale from the local Oak Creek Brewery. I would have loved to have gone to check out the brewery and maybe get a tour and sample tasting, but we didn’t find out about it until the last night we were there and we were traveling with a four-year-old. Oh well, maybe on another trip. And as nice as the Hilton was, the Oak Creek area looked like it had some excellent hiking and camping and I hear they have river rafting in the spring after the snow melts. So we’ll have to go back there someday.

Stay tuned for the pictures I took with my brand new toy, a digital camera! I have yet to check out the photos other than on the little LCD screen, but they look promising.

6 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

I LOVE Flagstaff! I have family that live there! It's too bad you didn't get to go hiking there, there are some truly beautiful trails!

TBone

4:19 PM  
Blogger ramblin' girl said...

glad you had a good vacation, Sedona's beautiful. looking forward to seeing some of your pics!

5:50 PM  
Blogger Tanya Kristine said...

first off, thanks for your kind words on my blog. you're so sweet and i'm VERY happy that you now love what you do - that is tremendous and so important in this short life and second: YOUR VACATION SOUNDS AWESOME! I love Arizona...what kind of camera did you get? i can't wait to see the pix either!!

7:07 PM  
Blogger Greg said...

I feel your comments about Scottsdale and the Sun City (A Community By Del Webb) communities. Its boring. I'm looking forward to my Grandma's 90th B-Day. So at least I'll have the fun family thing until ~8pm. If you remember anything worthwhile at night, please dial me into it!

8:32 AM  
Blogger Shananigans said...

I promise to try and get the photos posted tonight. I'm still learning with the whole Photoshop thingy. It's amazing what some simple color correction can do for your pics. I love digital photography! I got a Fujifilm Finepix A345 with 4.1 megapixels. Easy to use and I got some pretty good looking shots with it :)

10:32 AM  
Blogger Susan said...

I'm secretly jealous. I need a good vacation!

11:41 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home