March 2015
Stuart had done all the organising for this house exchange in Sedona and I hadn't
even looked at the photos, so when we were trying to find the house in
the dark, I naturally thought we were at the wrong place when we turned
up a steep, winding driveway towards a huge house that was invitingly
lit up. But, luckily for us it was the right house and we met Blaine and
Ellen - the owners. They lived upstairs and downstairs was for guests.
Us! After spending time chatting they took us downstairs (via the
stairs, not the lift!) and this is what we saw. Our home for a week was a huge area with 2 massive bedrooms, 2 huge bathrooms, a fully
equipped kitchen, washing machine and dryer, a living room with the
biggest TV we've ever seen..and beautiful polished concrete floors..
and when we woke in the morning this is what we saw from our bedroom window.
We couldn't believe our luck and it was ours for a week...for free! Our bedroom is the bottom windows.
Sedona is surrounded by red rock
and is
very spread out and unfortunately we were there during Spring Break, so there were cars and people everywhere and to get from where we were staying, into town, took forever. There was one single lane road and miles of traffic, so we tried to avoid the townsite of Sedona as much as we could, but we did visit it to check out the Chapel of the Holy Cross, which is built into the buttes of Sedona. A spectacular setting for any building.
Drone view of the church link
and surrounded by these amazing rock walls.
The accommodation was in a fantastic area for us to do day trips from...we visited the "ghost town" of Jerome, which would have been great if not for the crowds that visit it, like us, on a weekend.
And it was hardly a ghost town...tourist shops galore on winding steep streets...but I did buy this keyholder...
and we visited a few National Monuments, of which there are plenty in Arizona and our National Parks pass we bought in 2014 for $80, covered them all:
Montezuma Castle NM
Tuzigoot NM
Wupatki NM
Sunset Crater Volcano NM
Walnut Canyon NM...and the precarious walk down into the cave dwellings and the strenuous walk back up!
But the best place was...of course....going back to the Grand Canyon! We were staying a few hours drive from the GC and our aim was to get there mid afternoon and to watch the sun go down. It was just as spectacular the second time.
and you can NEVER have too many photos of the very grand Grand Canyon.
And as the sun went down and the temperature dropped the landscape changed.
There are many people who have never been to the Grand Canyon, so we feel very fortunate to have been able to see it twice....
Something else I always wanted to see was the iconic cactus that you see in Western movies. I have since been told they are called sequoia cactus and can grow up to 70 ft. So it was pretty exciting that there was a huge area of them only an hour away from where we staying. We got up before sunrise to watch the sun come up over them...
and just like the Grand Canyon, you can never have too many photos of sequoia!!
We kept on driving in search of more saguaro and came across a park, with a track through it, so we followed the track and it turned into a gorgeous walk through more and more cactus country...some flowering...and I think if we had been there a week later it would have been full of colour.
I was in sequoia heaven!
It's only a 2 hr drive from Sedona to Phoenix, and we had had no intention of going there, but decided why not, seeing as we were so close. We got there around 5pm and wandered around the city and State Capitol and checked out a few memorials.
It was a pretty insignificant city...and as we were leaving it we saw a crowd gathering outside the basketball stadium,
and not sure what was going on we decided to ring the guru of all things US basketball (NBA), Joshuah...in Australia. He told us there was a game between the Phoenix Suns and the Dallas Mavericks, starting in half and hour and we should go and watch it. So we bought two tickets for $20 each and got to watch our last NBA game in the US. I love the hype of the game, the noise, the action, the cheerleaders, the national anthem, the crowd, the lights, music...everything about the game is exciting and this game was really close, with the Suns ending up winning. Thanks Josh for telling us to go!
Ellen and Blaine (our hosts) wanted to take us out for dinner and learn more about Australia, so on our last night at their place we all went out for Thai..which they insisted on paying for. It was a great night..plenty of laughs and maybe one day they'll make the long trek from Arizona over to Western Australia. Their home was absolutely beautiful and we pinched ourselves everyday for their amazing generosity.
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