Arizona Road Trip Day 2, Globe to Holbrook

Hi Everyone,

As mentioned previously, we recently completed a road trip through Arizona. Lots of driving, lots of beautiful scenery. These next photos are from our Day 2, Globe to Holbrook. We chose this route because we wanted to do the scenic drive through Salt River Canyon.
The first montage of photos is from the drive through the canyon. Lots of twisty windy roads, lots of switchbacks. A few pull-out opportunities. We're very glad we added this to the itinerary as the scenery was stunning.

And apparently a little dangerous. The red circle in the second photo is actually a car pancaked on a cliff. Not sure what the story was there or how long the car had been there. Sobering though.

We spent several hours at the Petrified Forest http://www.nps.gov/pefo/. I had been there as a kid and remember being disappointed that it wasn't a real forest. Instead it's a bunch of fallen logs that are 225 million years old. Many lookouts and many opportunities to gawk.

If you'd like to see more photos, there's a beautiful 10 minute video that I stumbled upon on YouTube. It's : here.

We had to stop as a herd of pronghorn antelope took their time crossing the road. Good photo opportunity.


On the way out of the park we stopped at the side of the road and watched a spectacular sunset. It was hard to narrow down the images to just one, but I think this is my favourite. It turns out that it was our best sunset of the trip.

And, of course, we had to stay at the Wigwam Hotel in Holbrook. These are concrete wigwams that hold a single room and washroom. No neighbour noise, just the rumble of the trains behind the hotel. With the chill in the evening and the morning we slept very well.

Day 2 was wonderful but just a precursor to Day 3. It was hard trying to narrow down the photos for the blog. Eventually we'll get them on Flickr or something, but for now, here's just a taste of our second day.

Cheers,

Sandy

Arizona Trip Day 1, Phoenix to Globe

Hi Everyone,

It's crazy busy these days as I try to finish up a few projects at work, get ornaments ready for the Clayamies Christmas swap, and a whole host of other things. I have finally sorted through my 1000+ photos of our 12 day trip to Arizona and thought I would post some of my favourites from each day.

It's not necessarily going to be pretty because I find I can't predict the layout of the photos with Blogspot and it's the quickest way to chew up blogging time. So instead, I'll just sort of throw them out for people to look at and not worry about how the text flows around them.


The first day we flew from Toronto to Phoenix, rented our Pontiac G6 (an excellent car for two people doing a road trip with twisty windy roads, but not so good if you've got too many suitcases, which we didn't) and drove to Boyce Thompson Arboretum, about 55 miles outside of Phoenix. Both my husband and I are birders and wanted to see if there was anything in November there. A few new birds and lots of interesting scenery. Here are some of the pictures from the arboretum.



We probably spent two to three hours at the arboretum. Weather in late October was comfortable in pants and t-shirt but started to drop as the sun started to set. The photo on the left had an interesting sign, I'm sure it's a very effective way of keeping people on the trail. If you click on the photo you can see that it says "Rattlesnakes only". Needless to say neither one of us explored beyond where we were supposed to.




We had three geocaching travel bugs with us that wanted to go south. We enjoy helping travel bugs in their journeys and part of that is taking photos of them at interesting places. I took the picture in front of the boojum tree just because I liked the name and the appearance of the tree. The tree in the photo is only about two feet tall.






This last photo is of a gila monster. He (she?) is about two feet long and apparently we should consider ourselves lucky to have seen one. Gila monsters are one of two venemous types of lizards in the world (I'll let you look up the other one). This one was quite sedate and ambled away from the path at it's own pace.

We spent the night at a grungy hotel (it looked OK from the outside) in Globe, which was about another hour from the Aboretum. We loved the arboretum and would like to see it in a different season.

And that was Day 1. Next up, Globe to Holbrook and Petrified Forest.

We're back from 12 glorious days in Arizona...

Hi Everyone,

I haven't posted recently because we've been travelling Arizona for the last 12 days. It's been a wonderful trip and over the next while I'm going to preempt my usual clay talk for sights and impressions of the trip.

I did finally succumb at the Grand Canyon and bought a small beautiful piece by Jon Anderson. It's one of his buffalo and you can see a similar one here, even though we didn't see buffalo in Arizona. I'm thrilled with it!

Our itinerary (I'll add links later):

Day 1 - Toronto to Phoenix, visit Boyce Thompson Arboretum and overnight in Globe
Day 2 - Globe to Holbrook with visit to Petrified Forest and overnight in Wigwam Inn
Day 3 - Holbrook to Canyon de Chelly
Day 4 - Canyon de Chelly to 4 Corners and Monument Valley
Day 5 - Monument Valley to Winslow where we stood on a corner (Eagles song) and stayed in the Howard Hughes Suite of La Posada Inn
Day 6 - Winslow, Arizona to Grand Canyon South Rim
Day 7 - Grand Canyon to Flagstaff via Wupatki and Sunset Crater
Day 8 - Flagstaff to Sedona
Day 9 - Sedona, hiking for the most part
Day 10 - Sedona to Phoenix via Montezuma's Well
Day 11 - NASCAR race where unfortunately Carl Edwards didn't win
Day 12 - Phoenix to Toronto

More to come. We took over 1000 photos but most of them are triplicates as we played with exposures and settings. We took three geocaching travel bugs with us and have many photos of them in their travels as well.

I'll try to start posting soon.

Cheers,

Sandy