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January 30, 2015

IT'S FRIDAY, MY FAVORITE DAY!!

We have been here in Arizona visiting with relatives and eating out most of the week. What else do you do when you're on vacation?

Saturday we drove down to Casa Grande to visit with Dave's cousins, Del and Bev Nichols who spend their winters there. We had a nice visit with them and were entertained by their Dachshund, Buddy. Casa Grande is about an hour south of Phoenix, so we were able to spend a couple of hours at their place before heading back north. We then met up with Bob and Jeanne in Phoenix where we were invited to dinner with some other friends, Rudy and Ginger Carver. You can see where we spent most of our time talking and eating!

The next morning we met with our good friends, Pat and Betty Kaufman in Sedona for lunch. We met at their home where they have this gorgeous view of the red rocks of Sedona. We hadn't seen them for several years, so we really wanted to catch up with them this time. Besides, they had traveled to France last year and we wanted to pick their brains about their trip. We were able to come up with a full page of suggestions for things for us to see in Paris. Between lunch and visiting, we managed to be there 6 hours. The time just flew and we had a wonderful visit. On the way back to Phoenix, we decided to stop in Rock Springs, AZ to have dinner and to bring back one of their famous pies to Bob and Jeanne. We got the pie, but they were out of just about everything on their dinner menu. We ended up waiting an hour for hamburgers that weren't anywhere near as good as their pies.

Monday and Tuesday were our last two days in Phoenix before we headed to Flagstaff. I took Jeanne to her doctor appointment and then we did a little shopping before we said our good byes. We dropped Dave off at a woodworking store while we were gone. I don't think he missed us at all. We also went out for some good Mexican food at one of our favorite places, El Encante Dos on Carefree Highway.

Tuesday afternoon, it was off for Flagstaff. We decided to stay at the Twin Arrows Casino Resort on the Navajo Indian Reservation at the recommendation of Pat and Betty. It is a fairly new casino and we only paid $69 a night for a king size luxury room and the food is pretty good too. The decor is Navajo design throughout. The lobby is especially colorful. At the entrance, there is this lighted chandelier hanging in the rotunda and it is inspired by the colors of the journey through the four worlds. We decided to stay two nights as we wanted to do some site-seeing the next day and it was a pretty nice place to headquarter.

When we were looking for things to do on our round-about trip home, Dave mentioned that he has always wanted to see the meteor crater which was just off Route 66. That was just up the road from the casino, so that was our first stop. We arrived just in time to see a movie they presented and then we hiked out to look into this mile-wide crater that was formed 50,000 years ago by a meteorite when it struck the earth. It was amazing sight to see. It was a spendy stop for looking at a hole in the ground - even with a senior discount - but we're glad we stopped to see it.

Our next stop for the day was a visit to the Petrified Forest National Park. As you can imagine, this really is out in the middle of nowhere. We were having a difficult time believing "Nancy", our GPS voice when it came to giving us directions. Check out last week's journal for the reasons for that. Once again, she had taken us in a direction we weren't expecting. I'll give her credit this time though. Since this is a 28 mile drive through an area of petrified trees, we discovered that we could start from either end of the road. She just had us going to the southern end and working our way back north. We were thinking we would do it the other way around. So we started at the visitor's information center and saw some beautiful old trees. As we worked our way north, we saw what they call "Tepees". They were layered blue, purple and gray, created by iron, carbon, manganese and other minerals that stand in cone-shaped formations. Then there was the Blue Mesa with views of badlands, petrified log falls and pedestal logs. Newspaper Rock was one of our favorites where we could see hundreds of petroglyphs that were etched into stone. It seemed like every turn in the road was amazing. At the end of that road we drove through the Painted Desert before we got back on the highway.

Our last stop for the day was the town of Winslow. If you are familiar with The Eagles and the song "Take it Easy", you know about standing on the corner in Winslow, Arizona and we just couldn't pass by Winslow without stopping there. The town even has directions on how to find "the" corner! They even had the girl in the flatbed Ford! We bought a t-shirt just to remember our stop there.

We headed west to our next stop which was Henderson, Nevada to visit and spend the night with my cousin who lives there. I'll post more about that stop when we finish the trip in next week's journal.