Time flies when you're having fun...

When we left the Grand Canyon, we returned to Flagstaff and back to Kathy and Ralph's where Kathy and The Shepherd proceeded to evaluate everyone in the barn - whether whey wanted evaluated or not! We had another couple of fantastic dinners out and Kathy, the Master Spinner, gave me some helpful hints for a beginning spinner (yes, that would be me).







We really felt like we were leaving life long friends - and made big hints as to appropriate areas that we thought they should retire to (Wisconsin not being among the chosen places...)



Sunday a.m. before we left town, Kathy fixed us the best biscuits and gravy you've ever tasted as a "going away brunch". We bid them farewell - but who is that on the table? Could it be Penelope? No, I think it was Penelope's sister.













At any of the "Scenic stops" on tribal lands, there are many tables of vendors. I'm kicking myself, because the ones at the Little Colorado stop had these great ceramic Christmas ornaments that looked like they had been sand painted - between my inablity to choose "just the right one" and thinking we'd see them again, I didn't buy one - and of course, we didn't see them again - (you'd think I'd learned that lesson when I was in China years ago)



The quality of the goods at these vendors was generally quite good and much less expensive than in the stores "in town" - -plus you knew your money was going to the vendor/artist and not just to a "shop keeper".



We followed the Oak Creek Canyon route down through Sedona - which not surprisingly was one of Arizona's first "officially designated" scenic highways. Every turn brought a view more spectacular than the last.










We drove through the little town of Jerome - an abandoned mining town that, according to legend, was re-patriated by the hippies and artist types in the 60's. It's a harrowing, tight windey road - trailers and motorcoaches are not allowed on the highway because they would never make the turns.





We left Jerome, went "Up and Over" the mountains to Prescott - where we planned to have lunch - they must have some kind of laws banning restaurants in the city of Prescott - we drove around looking and looking, for about 45 minutes - finally ended up back out at the freeway interchange at a huge mall and gratefully found a Wendy's. (I don't think my bladder could have stood another mile! It certainly didn't like all the speed bumps in the mall, ha, ha, ha)



Lunched and rested we headed off to the last stop on our vacation - the town of Wickenburg, where The Shepherd lived as a child. The school he attended is on the national registry and has been preserved. The house he lived in has been replaced, but some of the neighboring houses were still there and occupied. He has a very uncanny sense of direction and was able to find all kinds of landmarks he remembered from the 5 or 6 years that they lived there.


The church where his parents worked as caretakers was still there. Seeing it again, he suddenly remembered the old fellow who was in charge of "ligurtical matters" and realized why he feels so strongly about ceremony and patterns of worship - apparently this gentleman ran the church with somewhat of an iron fist - because those traditions are still ingrained in his memory.



Wickenburg is a town where the cowboys load their saddles up in the Ford and take it to "Ben's Saddlery" on main street for repair.

It's a town where the store called "Ranch Dressing" is not a restaurant, but "A Clothes Store for Cowgirls".

It's a town where some of the kids he grew up with are still listed in the telephone book. It's a town that has a lot of restaurants, and we happened to pick THE WORST ONE for dinner :-(

It is also a town that is growing like topsey. There were huge tracts of land north of town that had been cleared and were very clearly "staked out" for subdivisions.



So there you have it and so ended our vacation - not much between Wickenburg and the Phoenix metro area. The little towns that used to be "Out in the Booneys" are now all connected. In 2006, Phoenix was the 5th largest city in the US, and the 13th largest metropolitan area in the country with a population of over 4 million people.

But you know what Dorothy said in "The Wizard of Oz"? "There's no place like home, there's no place like home"

Grab your ruby slippers, Shepherd, we're outta here!

We bid farewell to the Canyon

OK, so The Shepherd is USED to gettting up early - he gets up at "O-dark-30" every morning to feed the sheepies. Every morning during our vacation, he'd get up, go eat breakfast (did I mention that the Hampton Inn's had GREAT breakfasts?) then he would take a walk - by the time he got back to the room, I'd be up and showered and ready to go have a bite, and he would go have the 2nd course of his breakfast with me, and we'd get on with our day.

This was the view of the canyon from our room. I figured I could watch the sun come up, and snuggle back into my nice warm bed and get a few extra Z's - worked for me...

This is the same view, but outside on the lawn. We were in the Thunderbird Lodge - like I said, not fancy, but clean and the bed was comfy - and you just couldn't beat the view.

On John's early morning travels, he found the mule pen with all the dudes and dudettes getting ready to ride down the canyon on their new found buddies.

Off they go down the Bright Angel Trail

And if you click on this picture to biggify it, you can see the trail as it winds along that plateau in the center then drops over the edge down to the river.

We have been trying to get to the Grand Canyon for about 15 years -ever since we got together. A couple of times we almost made it, but it snowed (in April of all times) - the last time was in 2005 when we went to California to see the Redwoods. The gasoline situation looked like it might be kind of iffy, so we canceled the Arizona leg of our trip.

The Shepherd's dad actually helped put the railroad into Arizona when he was a young man - (many, many years before the Shepherd was born) - but the family moved to AZ when The Shepherd was 11 or 12 and they used to visit the Grand Canyon every year. That was before the time of the BIG motor home coaches - Facilities at the Canyon Village were limited. Many families camped, or like The Shepherd's family, rented one of the small cabins that were available. (they are still there, having been refurbished).

In those days, you could drive anywhere along the rim in the canyon - today many areas, private vehicles are restricted - - these areas, having been loved to death by the public are only accessable by bus. From looking at the handouts the the National Park Service it appears that they are developing a whole system of bus routes to transport the tourists from one area of the canyon to the other. I am glad we got to go when we did.

It will be sad, because you will be shoved into someone else's timetable. But, I can see their reasoning. Vehicles are responsible for a lot of the haze and smog that settles over the canyon. We were lucky - there was a bit of a breeze blowing the whole time we were there - keeping the skies bright and blue. The only smoke & haze we saw was from a few fires that the park service had started to keep the underbrush down.




So we left the canyon - back to Kathy & Ralph's Sheep Thrills Farm in Flagstaff to get a closer look at their little flock of sheeps, and to help them celebrate their 31st anniversary!

Sunrise on the canyon

The Shepherd got up to greet the dawn.

GOOD MORNING MR. CROW!!

We allowed as how they could be "VISHUS"

Our room at the Grand Canyon was in the Thunderbird Lodge (more about that in my next post). The room was clean & cheery - had TV, excellent cell phone reception, etc. and a whole lotta "outside staff".

We came out of the restaurant in the Bright Angel Lodge only to find the lawns of the lodge areas being grazed by deer and elk. Right there, munching on the lawn and any other tasty vegetation they could find!




Now, our friend Rascal worries about Vishus Deer and often gets concerned about Neelix and the Vishus Sheep . Well, he'd have been VERY concerned when he saw me pull out my camera - "Here, nice elk, don't attack me and push me off the edge (which was only about 35 feet away)" We got back to our room safely, and I got my (barely discernable) picture of a really big elk.






But not as REALLY BIG as this guy who is giving John the laser eye - he had plopped himself down in the middle of the driveway of the El Tovar Hotel with sort of an "As a matter of fact, I do own the road" attitude. If you click on the picture to biggify it, you'll see that his rack of horns extends waaaayyyyy up - The Shepherd figured they were at least 6 feet up from the grass - and that is on top of an elk that is standing six feet tall at the shoulder. I'm glad I was back in the room, safe from this critter!

Oh, My Goodness! I almost missed a stop!

Well, back to "What we did on our vacation" - Flagstaff, full steam ahead...

My "local friends" are amazed at the number of "blogger friends" that I have made. They were even more amazed when we announced that we were going to VISIT one of these blogger friends - and going so far to do it! Well, it wasn't exactly like we were going to visit strangers - after all, Kathy & I have been friends for over a year (at least) and she does raise Shetland Sheep, so she couldn't be all bad, right?

Like my sisters, Kat checked on me nearly every day last winter when John was hurting and Michelle from Boulderneigh and I waited on pins and needles to hear how her surgery turned out last summer - so we had a little bit of history here. But, to some extent, it was a leap of faith on both our parts.

Anyhow, we got kind of a late start out of Tucson, and it is a good 5 hour drive to Flagstaff under the best of circumstances. Count in lunch and a couple of rest stop stops and you have about 5 in the evening - almost dark - but there was time to freshen up at our hotel and head out to "Sheep Thrills Farm" to meet the Shepherds and the sheep. This is Skittles - He sent John a get well card last winter and John has wanted to meet him ever since. (Were Kathy & Ralph just and ends towards a means? I wonder)

We visited for a bit at their house, then headed into town for a delicious feast at the local "Outback Steakhouse". Pickin's on the flights down the day before had been pretty slim (granola bar, peanut butter crackers or ginger cookie - Delta Airlines doesn't skimp on the snacks - ha, ha) so I was really hungry - and the Outback Steakhouse is a good place to solve that problem - Yum...

We were up and att'm at the crack of dawn the next morning though - rather than just drive straight north to the Canyon, John took his favorite route a little to the east, past the lava fields and Sunset Crater (who'd have thought there would be lava fields in Arizona?) and mountains of black pumice - amazing!

We drove through the tribal lands - and miles and miles of pinyon and juniper -

Miles and miles and miles -

Our first stop of the day was the Wupatki National Monument - the pueblos that are preserved at Wupatki National Monument were constructed in the years following the eruption of nearby Sunset Crater, sometime between 1040 and 1100. Daytime summer temperatures hover around 100 degrees in

this area of the Colorado Plateau. Volcanic ash, deposited in thin layers, retained moisture and improved farming for an increased population at Wupatki.
(Info from National Park Service web site)

It was a little bit of a walk from the park center out to the ruins - John took these pictures - I shopped...
Kathy and Ralph had told us about a great place to have lunch in Cameron - there is a HUGE trading post (aka -tourist trap) there - every type of Arizona Curios that you could ever want - but in the back is a dining room decorated in the most beautiful Navajo rugs you have ever seen, serving some of the best food you'll have while you are in AZ. John had Navajo stew - it came with a plate size piece of fry bread - I had a Navajo taco - it came ON a plate size piece of fry bread - and the cool thing was it was not just the tourists eating there - there were a lot of locals - generally a very good sign for good food - I have a story about THAT (ie - lots of locals indicating a good restaurant) for later in our trip.

The thing about driving up to the Grand Canyon this way is you get the teaser of the Little Colorado Canyon - beautiful in it's own right.

Next up? The BIG Kahuna - The GRAND Canyon.

The Good, the Bad and the Beautiful...

THE GOOD:

There is NOTHING darker than a motel bathroom at night and the Hampton Inn on Grant Street in Tucson, AZ has the BEST idea that has hit motel bathrooms in decades:

Just a plain old night light! All it takes is a 20 watt bulb (or so) that is behind this little 5 or 6" grate...keeps the bathroom just light enough so you can see where the potty is in the middle of the night. They have my business forever!



The Hampton Inns also have the best complimentary breakfast - nothing "continental" about it either - a hot dish (sausage, ham, gravy, scrambled eggs, etc. - there was something different every day), with fluffy biscuits - warm pastrys, all sorts of breads, bagles, & muffins, fresh fruit, cut up fruit bowl, yogurt, cereal, coffee, tea, 3 different kinds of juices (are you ready to make your room reservations yet?) in a bright and cheery room with a BIG screen TV with the morning show on. Such a deal.














Now, this was REALLY good - it was the cheesy spinach & corn dip that we had at Buster's in Flagstaff. (Kathy, I'm working on the recipe - I'll let you know as soon as I have it perfected! )





THE BAD: Knowing that some yahoo had been through your suitcase as you started your journey. Did it make it better that they left a little note - not really -

We noticed that they didn't bother to go through our suitcases on the way back - way too may dirty clothes - or maybe it was all those little plastic baggies full of wool that Kathy sent back with me from her stash.

and, finally THE BEAUTIFUL - how can you help but not have a great vacation when you have scenery like this?
















Next on the itinerary? Sunset Crater and Wupatki National Monument.

First Stop - Tucson

The Mission San Xavier (pronounced as "hauv-e-air") del Bac is one of the most famous missions in the Southwest US. It is also one of The Shephard's favorite places in the whole world. Originally built near a Pima Indian village in 1783, the Mission had fallen into disrepair until the late 1800's when the gold rush brought more people to the area. A new priest was brought in and a school was eventually established.

Although there is no record of the architect or the artists who painted the interior and almost every available space is painted. The accoustics are incredible and they generally have recordings of monks chanting playing during the day. It is very cool and restful inside, despite the huge numbers of tourists who visit.

They still have services twice a day.

They were in the middle of renovation to the main dome, but you can see how beautiful it is by the surrounding buildings.


That night we went to El Minuto Cafe for great Mexican food with John's old friend Mary and her partner Steve. We haven't seen them in just about 10 years, but it was almost like we were just there last week. Such nice people



We had an appetizer called a Cheese Crispi, with green chilis - they aren't common here in B'ham town - so I wasn't sure what to expect - YUM - it was like a huge open faced faced quesadilla - and the green chilis were fresh not those slimy canned ones that I was expecting. Good choice, Steve!

We also spend some time visinting John's parent's gravesite. The town has changed a fair amount in the last ten years, but old Mr. "compass head" was able to find his way around quite nicely. If we hadn't been so tightly scheduled for the rest of the trip, I think we would have liked to have spent more time there - next time it won't be such a long interval.

So with the hills in the distance beckoning us, we head off north towards Flagstaff -

Nwxt I'll tell you about the good parts and the bad parts of traveling in today's post "911" era.

We're off to see Skittles and his friends.