Arizona is the Grand Canyon State but it should be the Superfantasticly Enormously Incredible Canyon State With Other Cool Stuff Too

Hi friends. This is another catchup post that takes us from Southern California all the way to Vegas via Arizona. If you want to read the last leg of our California adventure and haven't yet, just scroll down to the last post. Soon we'll be all caught up with a Utah/Colorado post so keep checking! Miss you all!

The drive from San Diego to Phoenix went rather smoothly. Alina read the entire way and I sped down the freeway through the desert and sang along to music. We made very good time and arrived in Phoenix by mid-afternoon. There we met up with Stacy, a friend of mine from William and Mary who just started graduate school in Phoenix for clinical psychology. She is an extremely fun and interesting person. At the beginning of the trip I actually thought that we might stay with her in Las Vegas where she spent the year after her graduation working as a welfare agent, which, as you might imagine, provided her with many funny stories which she shared with us over a delicious dinner of salmon and corn chowder that she cooked for us. Alina and I knew we were in good company when we were staying with some one who is big into cooking and the Food Network AND loves Arrested Development as much as we do. We had a nice long chat over dinner and did some catching up as well as getting to know a friend of hers who she had over for dinner. The plan was to hit the town for some Halloween celebrations, but Stacy’s friend was feeling under the weather and Alina was sleepy, so it was just Stacy and I. We went down to Tempe, where Arizona State University is located and where a huge Halloween street party was taking place. We had a great time walking up and down the main strip and seeing all of the costumes, some people had really gone all out. Our favorite was the guy dressed as Borat because he did the costume, and the accent, perfectly. Eventually we got tired of walking around and found a nice bar a bit off the main strip where we could have a couple of beers at and catch up. We had a huge amount of fun catching up and talking and then, having had our share of bars and Halloween for that evening, we made our way back to her apartment in Phoenix and hit the sack.

The next morning we all woke up at about ten and had breakfast while watching a few episodes of Arrested Development (season 3!!!). After that we showered and organized ourselves before going to lunch with Stacy at a nice Mexican restaurant called Aunt Chilada’s. Hilarious. Having enjoyed a fantastic lunch – hands down the best fish tacos I’ve ever had – we said goodbye to Stacy and hit the road. The drive up to Sedona was rather uneventful, but the scenery took a turn for the beautiful as we neared the Sedona area and began to see the striking red rocks that the town is known for. In Sedona we stayed with Peter’s father Scott, his wife Kari, and her three children. When we arrived it was just about to get dark and we sat down to catch up with Peter and get to know Scott, Kari, and the kids. After a while everyone was getting hungry so we ate a delicious salmon dinner. After dinner I played Scott and the twin boys, Chris and Joe, at a rock ‘n roll trivia game and won in an upset after Scott had led the entire game. It all had to do with escaping from disco purgatory and getting a few lucky questions: Lou Reed lyrics and the conditions surrounding Janis Joplin’s death. By the time the game was over it was past everybody’s bedtimes and we settled down to sleep.

Stacy with us right before we left Phoenix

Our first view of the red rocks as we approached Sedona

The next morning we were up and out early to go exploring in Sedona. Peter showed us around the pleasant little touristy town for a few hours and we window shopped through the booksellers and New Age stores before grabbing lunch at a cool vegetarian place called D’lish. Now fueled up with healthy vegetarian food we embarked upon a hike that featured both great views of the red rocks as well as many other beautiful colors from the changing autumn leaves. We were quite pleasantly surprised by the changing leaves in Arizona since this was the first that Alina or I had seen of any true fall colors. Our hike was beautiful and took up most of the afternoon. By the time we were finished we were due back at the house to meet Scott to ride up to Flagstaff. The drive to Flagstaff, a slow climb up the Colorado Plateau, was a beautiful hour long ride. Scott and Peter went up to Flag to go to an indoor rock climbing gym for the evening. In the presence of such good climbers (Scott is one of the world’s best and Peter is good himself) Alina and I decided not to burden them with amateur climbing lessons and instead enjoy watching all of the skilled rock climbers tackle different routes. We both had a lot of fun watching them, and for the first time in my life I think I might even, one day, far in the future, consider the possibility of rock climbing. Maybe. That’s a big step from thinking that climbing up rocks over dizzying heights is the most illogical of all pursuits, which was my former opinion of the sport. At any rate after a few hours at the gym we made our way back to Sedona and made ourselves a late pasta dinner before passing out, tired from all that rock-climbing watching. It’s surprising how tiring watching other people exert themselves can be.

The incredible view of the stunning red rocks and that foxy Blazer from Scott and Kari's living room window

View of the rocks from our hike

The next morning we left Sedona early and drove back up to Flagstaff, this time to see the town outside of the climbing gym. We spent most of the morning just walking around the cute town. It’s a pretty place with a lot of small town character, with the famous Route 66 cutting right through it. At a nice thrift shop Alina and I both found things we’d needed for a long time (her: earring backs and jeans, me: light zip-down jacket) and, of course, more used books. I think that the count of used books in Speedy’s backseat may be approaching the triple digit range. After a bit more walking around we ate brunch at one of Peter’s favorite restaurants, Bellavia, where we all had absolutely delicious and huge portions of breakfast food. Alina had a particularly interesting meal of a humongous oat filled Swedish pancake stuffed with blueberries. Now all fueled up, we did a little more walking around before saying goodbye to Peter and hitting the road once more, this time headed for the Grand Canyon.

There really aren’t words or pictures that do the Grand Canyon justice, and there isn’t a way to describe what it feels like to see it for the first time. As John Muir famously wrote of it “Nowhere else something something nature’s single bold statement in stone.” We pulled up to Mather Point late in the afternoon and spent a good little while just gaping at the immense and colorful canyon. It is truly one of the most spellbinding things that I have ever seen. After our share of jaw-dropped amazement, we made our way to a visitor’s center to get a little info about the canyon and to ask a ranger for some hiking recommendations. Having settled on a busy agenda of hiking and programs for the following day, we made our way to the campsite, got our site, and set up our home for the next two nights. That night was a pretty standard camp night featuring a hearty but modest dinner and a few hours around the campfire.

We got up early the next morning to be at the rim for a nine o’clock ranger walk. The walk was informative and the ranger was very good, although the fact that we were about the only people there between voting age and AARP membership was a slight indication that ranger walks aren’t something targeted towards our demographic. After the hour long walk we did a bit of browsing around Grand Canyon village before gearing up for our hike and taking the bus to the South Kaibab trailhead. We had an absolutely spectacular time hiking down into the canyon. The descent into the canyon was quick and beautiful. I’m glad that the ranger recommended the Kaibab hike to us; she had told us that it offered unparalleled views and she was certainly correct. We reached Cedar Ridge, which was originally our intended turn around point, quickly and, though we knew that we had the tough climb back to the rim ahead of us, decided that we could still go a little deeper into the canyon. After a while we looked back up to the distant rim and figured that was a lofty enough goal for the day and turned around to begin our ascent. On the way we took a break back at Cedar Ridge for lunch before trekking back up the trail. The way up was pretty steep but still very enjoyable. Though there were lots of warning signs about over-exertion, I think we both felt that the Grand Canyon hike was a bit easier than both the Vancouver and the Yosemite hikes. We made it back to the top relatively quickly and took the bus back to our campsite, stopping on the way at a viewpoint near our trailhead where we could look down and see most of our hike into the canyon.

That afternoon we rested a bit at the campsite playing scrabble and reveling that golden post-long-hike feeling. Alina somewhat disrupted my reveling by clobbering me in the scrabble game, but that’s okay I’ll get her next time. As night fell we made our way back to the rim for a moonlight walk with a ranger, which sounded like an awesome program. Apparently it sounded awesome to a lot of people, because we arrived to find sizeable cadres of tourists walking around in the dark aimlessly looking for the “westernmost point of the Mather area rim path.” In an impressive show of organizing with strangers, we set up watch groups and search squads and eventually found the ranger already surrounded by a large group of people located at what is certainly not the westernmost point of the Mather area rim path. At any rate, happy to have found the program we walked with the ranger, a goofy rambling old man who really didn’t tell us anything all that interesting and was quite prone to esoteric tangents. For instance he got the crowd all riled up about scorpions and we talked about that for about a quarter of the hour-long walk. Oh well, though the program could have been better, the Grand Canyon glowing in the light of the full moon couldn’t have been a more spectacular sight. The moon illuminated the canyon surprisingly well, and the buttes and plateaus looked much like ghostly grey ships floating on the black void of the canyon below. We gawked at it for as long as we could stand the biting cold and then made our way back to the campsite to build a big fire, eat dinner, and shiver in our sleeping bags until morning.

My first view of the Grand Canyon

What is she looking at? Doesn't she know it's right in front of her?!

Crows over the canyon

The formations in the canyon are too beautiful to simply call buttes, so they call them temples. This is Isis Temple, which our hike offered many stunning looks at.

The view of the hike below from where we took a brief rest. You can see the path weaving down to Cedar Ridge.

Hiking in the canyon

No pictures even began to show how pretty the Grand Canyon was in the moonlight, but hopefully this might offer a tiny flavor of it.

The next we’d planned on waking up super early and being packed up and watching the sunrise over the Canyon by 6:45. Well we actually woke up at 8:30 so that didn’t happen, but we packed quickly and made our way back to Grand Canyon village for a last look over the rim and a bit of shopping for gifts and souvenirs. After that we drove out to Desert Point, where a four-story tower sits on the edge of the Grand Canyon overlooking the surrounding desert and its sudden transformation into the canyon. After some last views we ate lunch in the parking lot and began to head east, having not heard from my friend in Vegas and therefore deciding to bypass it and head straight up into Utah. But just a few minutes into the drive we finally got cell reception and were able to contact Travis, an old High School friend of mine working in Vegas as a software designer who told us to come on over. And so we turned Speedy around and drove towards Vegas, stopping along the way only for gas and a brief stop at the Hoover Dam, which was impressive and perhaps even neat. Other than that there’s not much to say about it.

We didn't get a great vantage point of the Hoover Dam, but you get the picture.

We made great time getting to Las Vegas and arrived at Travis’s apartment a couple hours before dinner. We spent a while catching up with Travis and getting cleaned up before hitting the strip. Las Vegas is such a bizarre anomaly of a place. Set up by mobsters tired of doing business in Los Angeles, which had the pesky problem of laws and even police, they moved out to this little valley in the middle of the desert and established what would become one of the most glamorous and lavish places in the country. It’s hilarious and sickening and fascinating and lots of fun. We parked at the Bellagio and made it outside just in time to catch the Bellagio’s fountain show to “Proud to be an American.” We walked up and down Las Vegas Blvd just looking at the outlandish sights before heading into the Monte Carlo casino where Travis knew a nice Irish Pub. We had a tasty dinner at the pub, where they had their own microbrewery featuring a particularly good red. After dinner we walked down the strip and caught another fountain show at the Bellagio, this time to Elvis’s “Viva Las Vegas,” a much more appropriate song we all agreed. Next it was time to do our big Vegas gambling adventure. We went to Travis’s favorite casino, the (relatively) less showy Barbary Coast where Travis demonstrated himself to be the only real gambler among us by hitting up the craps table. I stuck to something more my speed, the penny slots! I really wasn’t there to win money, just to have free drinks brought to me while I spent a couple of bucks. This is how Stacy, having lived in Vegas for over a year, assured me I could beat the system and extract far more in alcohol costs than I contributed through the penny slots. Well I did beat the system, but in a different way. I couldn’t get a drink on that busy night, but I did win $40 from my dollar in the penny slots, so I’m quite happy. I should have just quit then but thinking I could do it again I played a few more bucks. Once I realized that my forty to one victory was only a rare glitch, however, I gave it up, and went home that night up by over thirty bucks. Sweet!

The Bellagio fountain show

Did you know both Paris and New York are just Vegas neighborhoods?

In the MGM they have lions. Freaking lions! Why?

My lucky casino

The next morning Travis had to leave for work early and we got up with him and went back the strip to see it by daylight. It is perhaps less garish without the neon but it is certainly the same insane little city. It actually seems perhaps a bit stranger in the morning, where the morning light illuminates grandma and pimp alike, sitting side by side and both smoking Marlboro Reds and sipping their martinis over a game of blackjack at 8:30 in the morning. Curse Vegas if you wish, but never deny that it’s one of the country’s truest melting pots. We walked into a couple of the more famous casinos, such as New York New York, Caesar’s Palace, and the MGM. It was at the MGM that we splurged in a big way on one of the famous Vegas buffets. For the low price of $14 I gouged myself with every kind of food imaginable and consumed probably two days worth of calories. It is only the second time in my life that I’ve feared that my stomach might burst under the pressure of how much I’d consumed. Alina actually fared much better than I, not insisting on finishing plates but instead emphasizing trying to at least sample everything at the feast. She was nearly successful, and was actually keeping pretty good form until she loaded up on frozen yogurt at the end. Then her color began to take on the lovely distinct green tint that mine had adopted. Both ridiculously full we waddled slowly back to our car in the Caesar’s Palace parking garage and drove away from that sinful and fantastic city towards the natural beauty of Utah’s National Parks. Join us next time for our adventures in Zion, Bryce, and more!

Fondly,

Paul