Hello everyone — hope you all had a great Thanksgiving week! Jason and Jen came and visited us, so we had a number of days of sight seeing. I have a lot of catching up to do, so here goes…
Saturday before Thanksgiving
We drove to Phoenix to pick up Jason and Jen in the morning. It was interesting to see some of the landscape changes as we left the valley area and headed towards Phoenix. Tall cactus are not really present in the valley area, but we noticed as soon as the landscape changes how they really added to the landscape.
The landscape was flat as you can see in the first picture, but then quickly the large cactus started to pop up along the freeway. We waited for Jason and Jen’s flight to land parked in the cell phone lot at the Phoenix airport. (What a great addition to airports — the cell phone lot!!!) This cactus was at the edge of the parking lot.
Jason travels a lot to Phoenix for work so we asked him for a suggestion for lunch. He always talks about Oregano’s Italian and it did not disappoint!! The pizza was great and sitting outside added to the fun of having a lunch in Phoenix. After we headed back to Camp Verde to our campgrounds.
Flagstaff Trip
One of Jen’s bucket list items was to see the Grand Canyon, so that was one of the places we had on our list to see while they were here. We decided to rent a place in Flagstaff for a couple of nights so the drive would be shorter to the Grand Canyon. We stopped at a few places along the way, including stopping for breakfast in Sedona.
Driving in to Sedona was so much fun to hear Jason and Jen’s expressions at the first look at the red rocks of Sedona. “WOW!!” was a great word to describe the sights as we entered the red rock area.
Certainly the pictures do not begin to capture the truly awe inspiring view of these red rocks. Driving into Sedona, you come over the hill and are immediately silenced with the awe of the landscape. Even though we had driven this route a few weeks back, it is still exciting to enter into the Sedona area…and more fun when someone is seeing it for the first time and has the great reactions that Jason and Jen did (well, really Jen….LOL). Once you got into Sedona proper, you could tell this has become quite a tourist attraction — the traffic really increased! But the scenery helped distract from the traffic, plus Jason was driving! 🙂 We headed to the Red Rock Cafe for breakfast since it had good ratings on Yelp. With the 45 minute wait we thought the ratings must be correct. It is the home of the giant sweet roll, which we had to get to share — even sharing, we only ate half of it!
The breakfast was great and definitely worth the wait if you are in Sedona. Being Thanksgiving week may have made it more busy too!
Outside of Sedona, is Slide Rock State Park. The name comes from the natural water slide formed by the Oak Creek Bed. We had Max with us so we could not go down to the slide…and it was too cold to go in it…so we just viewed it from above which was amazing! There were a couple of people that were braving the cold weather and cold water, but they did not stay in the water for very long.
Continuing the drive along 89A, heading towards Flagstaff there is a rest area that is also a beautiful scenic overlook. You can see the road and switchbacks that wind along the side of the mountain that we traveled up to get to this spot. Looking over the edge and seeing the winding roads gave you a sense of how high up we were at that spot.
Since we got to Flagstaff before our check in time at the VRBO house we decided to do a couple of tourist things there. We tried to find a wine tasting experience, but instead found something called a meadery, with a tasting option. I had never experienced Mead — And if you don’t know what Mead is it is an alcoholic beverage created by fermenting honey with water, sometimes with various fruits, spices, grains or hops. The alcoholic content ranges from about 3.5% ABV to more than 20%. We decided to try a flight, which provided various options of flavors: apple, cranberry, pineapple, etc.
They had just finished their Sunday brunch, so they even provided us with some appetizers to go along with the mead. There were some flavors that were very good…others not so much. But we did buy a couple of bottles to share at Christmas.
Then we went to find a place for lunch and right next door there happened to be an Escape Room. Both Jason and Jen have done a few Escape Rooms, including the surprise engagement of Jen’s sister, Sarah, in an Escape Room in Minnesota, so they were both experienced escapees. 🙂 The sign indicated that they would take walk-ins so we decided to give it a try! What a hoot!!! It was a basketball team theme including a locker room and the coaches office. I am excited to try one again in Minnesota. And here were our results:
We escaped and only needed a couple of clues!! Lots of fun and if you have not ever done one, you should try it — remember to think outside the box!! 🙂
TIFN — next will be our trip to the Grand Canyon and back through Sedona!
Dandy Ventures 