Arizona trip - Arrival & Day 1 & 2

Greetings from Flagstaff Arizona! It is beautiful, clear and pleasant here and I am enjoying a cup of coffee on the balcony. The view is of 2 of the mountains of the San Francisco peaks – gorgeous!

We had an uneventful flight from Philadelphia (the best kind!) on Friday, and arrived in Phoenix where it was a blistering 112 degrees! I have never felt anything like it. While it is true that dry heat is much more tolerable than humidity, nonetheless 112 degrees is just unbelievably hot! I could actually feel myself dehydrating. It felt like standing in front of a hot oven.

Anyway, we picked up our rental car (a Nissan Quest), and headed for our first stop. I had booked us for one night at the Camelback Inn (I’d gotten a great rate when I packaged it with the rental car). It was a beautiful hotel, located between Camelback and Mummy mountains in Scottsdale. All the rooms are located in adobe casitas, and they are decorated in a very pleasing Southwestern style.

Here are some photos before we messed the rooms up too badly (we needed two connecting rooms to fit all 6 of us):





We cooled off in the room for a few minutes, and then went down to the restaurant to eat. It was on 5:00 in Phoenix, but our bodies felt like it was 8pm and we were hungry! We elected to eat outside under the misters. Here we are:




The food and the service were terrific! In fact, every single staff person that we met was friendly and went out of their way to be of service.

After dinner Hannah (16), Annika (10) and I decided to go for an early evening walk around the resort. We went up towards Mummy Mountain where they have a kind of fake Western town. They must do a show there when it is not 110 degrees! Anyway, we went for a little walk in the desert, and got some really nice pictures of some of the mountains and desert flora at sunset:





I have never been in the desert before and the beauty of the landscape was a real revelation to me! I don’t think I could live there – I like green too much, and I actually like humidity – but I would love to go back and visit again.

Anyway, at this point I was getting totally exhausted, and the kids wanted to watch Camp Rock (?), so we went back to the room. Tom and I crashed and the kids watched their movie and then put themselves to bed.

We got up, and had a wonderful buffet breakfast at the hotel restaurant. My son loved the pancakes, and our waitress went totally out of her way and got him the recipe, which was very, very sweet of her. We decided against a swim, and got ready to leave the hotel – which involved everyone showering and packing. Believe it or not, that took a while! We had a lovely time at the Camelback Inn, and would have liked to stay longer. If we come back to the Southwest we will definitely return!

We had a couple of hours before we wanted to head up to Flagstaff so we decided to go to the Heard Museum, which focuses on Native American culture and art. Tom and I were both Anthropology majors, so we knew we would find this fascinating. We were there for about 2 hours – it is a very nice museum, and I definitely recommend it. After a lunch at Taco Bell, we were on our way to the mountains.

The trip from Phoenix to Flagstaff is truly amazing. I’m afraid that I don’t have any pictures (any pictures I have ever taken from a vehicle on a highway have not been worth looking at anyway!), but essentially you move from an ecosystem of low desert – saguaros, other cacti, and an arid landscape – through a high grassy plain, to green mountains of pines and beeches, all in the space of 2 ½ hours. You climb from about 1500 feet above sea level to 7000 feet! Meanwhile, our minivan was laboring up these amazing steep hills, with periodic vistas of valleys and cliffs. Truly amazing! It is totally worth the trip if you ever get the chance.

We arrived at Flagstaff at about 4:15, checked into our timeshare, and settled in. I think this post is long enough for now so I will save pictures of our condo for my next post.

Our plans for today: visit the Renaissance Faire in Flagstaff, and perhaps hike in Walnut Canyon. And I have a little 4 mile run planned as well!