Of Tourist Traps, Velveeta Cheese, and Edgar the Elk

Greetings from Arizona!

Yes, that is my picture. And it's not even the Grand Canyon - it's Red Rock State Park, just past Sedona.

I suppose you can gather from the title that yesterday was full of very different experiences. It began at 6 AM, since our internal clocks have an annoying tendency to not let us sleep past that time regardless of vacations. It didn't end until almost 10PM here - midnight at home.

 It's fitting that I should have called this blog my misadventures. Of course, we took US Airways here. But they're going through a merger and they sent us up and down O'Hare (bags in tow) until we finally managed to get to the right gate. That doesn't sound so terrible, and it isn't, but O'Hare is not small. Furthermore, it is NOT self-explanatory.

So by the time I got on the plane I was glad to just sit down. I know you're expecting a list of what went wrong with our flight, but there were no real problems and we arrived in Phoenix safely. Our stuff was flown with us, but we didn't see it in Phoenix. Joy has never been on a "moving sidewalk" (you know those flat escalator-type things at airports?). So my mom decided that she would walk alongside and Joy and I would walk on the moving sidewalk. It reminded us of the suspender joke, which, if you have never heard, you can ask us about when we get back.

The gist of the thing is that we arrived in Flagstaff undamaged and undaunted. AND with all of our stuff, which is a real bonus.

So far, so good. Even the car rental went off wonderfully. And we only got semi-lost on the way to the Walmart (nor really lost, just a few panicky minutes), and the Subway was delicious and we found everything we wanted to buy at Walmart except apples. (Incidentally, this is where the Velveeta cheese comes in - we're planning on living on PB&J sandwiches, and cheese sandwiches, if the food here proves prohibitively expensive.)

We drove through winding roads with absolutely no guardrails and enormous dropoffs on the way to Oak Creek Canyon - a state park some thirty minutes south of Flagstaff. On the way there, we saw rocks that looked like a Moorish castle in Spain. We couldn't get to Oak Creek Canyon, though, because there had been tremendous fires and there was danger of flash flooding. So we passed that up, and went through Sedona - THE most tourist-trappy place I've seen in all my born (and unborn) days. It really looked like somebody photoshopped a nice background onto a travesty of shops and 50's diners.

We drove through Sedona and found ourselves in the most beautiful assortment of red rocks imaginable. Naturally we pulled over to the first available lookout point and took entirely too many pictures.

And then we drove three hours to our hotel. It rained. Poured is more like it. I'm not sure why, but I thought Arizona was arid and hot. I have been thus far pleasantly surprised.

When we got to the hotel, there was an elk in the front yard, munching on grass. I named him Edgar Elk, personally. For some reason elk running amok is perfectly normal here. They let them graze all they want on the hotel grass, but the manager watches to make sure they don't get too close to the road. "When they do," he said, "I just shoo them back." There are so many weird things about that statement.



Now I am in my nice, cool hotel room. It's much too fancy for the likes of us, but we've made up our minds to enjoy it thoroughly while we're here. (Speaking of fancy, why do we need two sinks in one hotel room? His and hers?)