Roberta - Canyon Bound

It's been two days and we still haven't reached our intentional destination, the face of Arizona, the famed Grand Canyon. However, we are finally on the road as I type, headed in that direction.

I am not at all dismissing the past couple of days we've spent in Arizona; I've actually quite enjoyed them. When we first reached Phoenix, we spent the afternoon with the Gullens in Scottsdale, who fixed us a wonderful lunch and let us rest our feet a while. As we moved on, we ended up in Wickenburg for the night. Once known as the dude ranch capital of the West, Wickenburg has a few neat old building dating back to the 1800's and a decent Best Western. Anita's Cocina is not a bad place for breakfast either.

From there, we drove up to Prescott this morning, reached it by noon, and ordered the first burgers of the day at Kendall's Famous Burgers and Ice Cream (a cute little old fashioned diner place). Then we went to check out the Southwest Indian Arts Festival and hunted for turquoise jewelry (the one goal my mother has for this trip is to find a size 9 ring with a small turquoise stone ~ unfortunately none of the 10 jewelers at the festival had such a thing). Thirty minutes later we drove about 5 miles north out to the Granite Dells, a place Nathan would describe as playground heaven. It's a large area filled with massive granite boulders embedded in the ground and stacked upon each other making for a fantastic climbing, running, and jumping experience. There is a lovely lake encircled by these rocks and we played around with my dad's snazzy new camera and took some great pictures.

Now, we're out on the road. There is desert out in every direction until it suddenly juts up into phenomenal, sharp-peaked mountains. Amazingly, waaay out in the distance, there are a couple mountains visible with snow-capped peaks. It's quite a stark contrast.

For a Georgia girl, the scenery here is quite an attraction. Its dryness and shadelessness is drastically different from the humidity and greeness of the South. Every time I see a Saguero cactus, I feel giddy inside because I've only seen them in pictures before and they are so much more bizarre in real life. Right now, I can see maybe 40 or 50 miles out in front of me because the land is so flat and the road is so straight in comparison to the winding city streets of Atlanta. It's so open here that I don't feel confined by anything but the car, and we're only about 50 miles from the Grand Canyon, so I'll be free of that soon enough. As with the Saguero, I've only seen the Canyon in pictures and movies before, and I'm sure, as with the Saguero, that those representations won't come close in comparison with the overwhelming grandeur of the real thing.

Julie - The truth about the Best Western

Bob is very eloquent in describing our first night's stay in Arizona. It was quite pleasant, but he got the name of the hotel wrong. It wasn't "Rancho Grande," it was actually "Raunchy Grungy."

Did you notice the empty beer can and cigarette butt on the ground in this picture of Bob on our patio???

Bob - Phoenix & Wickenburg

After arriving in Phoenix and getting our rental car we negotiated the streets to the Gullen's home in Scottsdale. We had a delightful visit catching up on family news, discussing family history, and remember the summer of 1963 when Betty visited with us for a couple of months.

We somewhat reluctantly left the cool respite of the Gullen home, having enjoyed a refreshing meal and good conversation and forged into the late afternoon heat of the day to our destination for the evening, Wickenburg.

Wickenburg is on the northern edge of the Sonora desert, so we passed through lots of scrubby cactus filled landscape, thankful that we were in a car with the AC going full blast. The mountain ranges in the distance gave a nice sense of drama to the landscape.

We found our Best Western Rancho Grande Motel. It is very colorful and decorated in Southwestern motif. I think its hayday was in the 1970's, but it was reasonably clean and not too crowded. We all went to the pool. Nathan and I actually got in, but the girls were suspicious of the less than pristine looking waters. There was a pool basketball goal set up so Nathan and I had a game of "pig" and then a no holds barred, anything goes, game of basketball. He executed his "cunning plan" to perfection and snatched victory from the jaws of defeat!











^ The exterior decor of our motel, the Rancho Grande!













^ Fun at the pool!

Bob - The Plan

We are off! I am sitting on the plane with Roberta, Nathan, and Julie as we are winging our way to Phoenix, AZ.

We began planning this trip months ago; made our flight reservations and reserved a room at the Grand Canyon for a week, knowing we wouldn't stay there the whole time. But with busy work schedules for Julie and I both we didn't get around to what, for me anyway, is often one of the most enjoyable parts of a trip, the planning, until just a couple of weeks before we departed. Even then, without my brother David's input-he suggested a full trip itinerary for us-I'm not sure what we would be doing. With only some slight modifications we are following the plan David suggested.

We are scheduled to arrive in Phoenix about 12:30pm and the Gullen's have invited us for lunch. Actually they very graciously invited us to stay and visit for a couple of days, but we declined. Much as I'm sure we would enjoy the visit we have scheduled a lot for our time in Arizona-perhaps more than we can do in the 7 days we will be there. After lunch with Gullen's we plan to drive on to Wickenburg and spend the night there. We want to see the Desert Callaberras Museum which has a collection of western art and currently has an exhibit of western art by women titled, "Cowgirl Up!" Wickenburg is also a center for "Dude" ranches-some of up to 20,000 acres-but there will not be any City Slickers action for us there!

From Wickenberg we will go on to Prescott and see Granite Dells then travel on tothe Grand Canyon. We do not expect to arrive there until late in the day. This will be Sunday night. We will spend two more nights, Monday and Tuesday there staying at the El Tovar Hotel, right on the Canyon edge.

Wednesday morning we will get up early for the drive to Page. Along the way we plan to stop at Horseshoe Bend. We will spend two nights in Page. Thursday we plan to take an all day boat tour to Rainbow Bridge. It is the longest natural bridge in the US and can only be reached by boat and a 1 mile hike or (without boat) by a 13 mile hike. We are indebted to David for recommending this and much of the rest of our itinerary.

After we leave Page we drive to Sedona and will spend the night there before flying out of Phoenix the next morning. We go from Phoenix to Oregon for a week with Julie's folks in Sweet Home.

Bob & Roberta - setting up the blog

Well here we are late on the night of our departure getting the blog set up. Think it is good to go now.