Posts tagged Arizona

We woke up Tuesday morning and toured a bit of Flagstaff, AZ. It was a great looking town, but provided some interesting surprises including Katelyn being scammed into buying some “local” earrings. See her side of the story here:

We otherwise just walked around and snapped some shots before moving on.

We were anxious to get moving and see some of the scenery so we drove to Sedona, AZ to check out the sites. Here’s a video of some of the drive:

Getting to Sedona was our first non-GPS frustration, but we managed with a combination of gas station directions and good luck. Thankfully, Katelyn and I have done pretty well at seeing the bright side of frustrations and keep ourselves laughing. Here’s an example of how we do this:

Once we enjoyed some time in Sedona, we decided to try to make it to the Grand Canyon before dark and get some good pictures. We weren’t quite sure what to expect because neither of us had been there, but we prepared to be amazed. We got a little lost and confused actually getting to the canyon (we didn’t think it’d be so hard to find something so incredibly huge), but we made it! (For any Radcliffe players reading this– check out my sweatshirt!!)

The Grand Canyon is in fact, very grand, and was really breathtaking.

This photo below is especially for you, Mom!

We drove around to some other vistas around sunset and took in more sites before we ran out of daylight.

After we were done, we drove to Page, AZ, a small town right near the border of Utah and spent the night in a motel. This little town was pretty quiet, hampering our plans to be social and meet some locals, but thankfully Katelyn and I are still creative and always able to find fun in the most unexpected circumstances.

The next morning we woke up and decided to just see where the day took us. We headed towards Lake Powell, which ended up being only a few  miles from Page. We stumbled upon a deserted park area with an awesome view of the lake and the surrounding landscapes.

We found these amazing rock/sandstone formations and had some room to hike around and explore. We were less than prepared for intense hiking, but still managed to climb around.

I managed to make it to the top of the tallest formation around us, and got an awesome 360 view of the area.

The solitude and peace of the area were amazing (one of the benefits of touring areas on the off-season). The sun was shining and warm, and we spent some time just relaxing on the rocks.

We’ve been taking a lot of pictures obviously, so I wanted to get creative. You gotta spice it up right?

After getting our fill of Lake Powell, we decided to get a move on and drive towards Monument Valley to get  more of a taste of the southwest. Apparently Monument Valley is where a lot of the western movies were filmed, and it was conveniently en route to our final destination for the day (Boulder, CO), so we could hardly resist stopping for some more photos and scenery.

Monument Valley was also gorgeous. This part of the country was honestly hard for me to wrap my mind around. It was hard not to feel like I had walked into some dream world. These landscapes are so unique and different from everything I’m familiar with, yet they exude this incredibly feeling of nature and its power. It was also interesting to see a bit of the Native American culture. We visited a Navajo market, and I found myself incredibly curious about their culture and also just was hit by the reality of how little I know about their lifestyle, culture and history. I felt the same curiosity that I’ve had for other cultures in Asia and Africa, but realized that these cultures are in our own backyard.

Despite the intellectually intriguing conversation that was sparked between Katelyn and I about the situation of Native Americans, we still saw Monument Valley as the perfect backdrop to our next Roadside Dance Party. Although we got a few less honks than the first time in California, we still had a blast. We’re still hoping that one of these days someone will actually join us. (And we’re still shamelessly trying to get on the Ellen Show!)

We also stopped off at a few more places for photos with the scenic backdrop, but again, we’ve felt compelled to make our pictures more interesting.

Once we lost daylight though, we had to focus on getting to Boulder, which was a good haul.

We spent probably a good 13 or 14 hours in the car, hit some snow going through the Rockies, and kept ourselves entertained with lots of music, Dairy Queen (Reese’s blizzards are lifesavers) and other antics to break up the  monotony and keep us laughing. We finally made it to Boulder at about 1am, tired but triumphant after a long but awesome day.