You can count me in, though I’m not sure “ready” is the best word for it. Summer seemed to pass by so fast this year. Barely had time to really enjoy it, it seems, before it’s practically gone. They say this happens as you get older, but I suspect in my case it has more to do with a dearth of time spent outside this year, soaking up sun and heat. That kind of thing has a way of slowing down clock and calendar. Try it and you’ll see what I mean.
Nevertheless we did get out to see some fairly amazing things in the past few weeks, which I’m very keen to show you. I took an awful lot of pics during our three days at the Grand Canyon, which was our next stop after Red Rock, and I’m quite satisified with them overall. We booked both the sunset and sunrise bus tours, and although that was a mixed bag for me due to an amateurish camera setting screwup, I still managed to get some impressive photos of the canyon, far better than last year’s set.
What made me happiest, though, was the opportunity to photograph some of the canyon ravens and crows up close this time, thanks to my P1000 and its powerful zoom lens. I edited this one especially to hang up on our wall during the Halloween season.
Arrived in beautiful Telluride, Colorado, and yes, this is my first update since day #2 of vacation. So much for my Travel Log. Between lack of cell signal and surrendering my phone to the kid, and straight up being too busy and/or exhausted, I haven’t had much opportunity for posting.
We’ve been busy!
Back to the Grand Canyon this year, and this time we got to spend a night in the park, with a chance to do some dawn/dusk shots of the canyon itself. I can’t wait to show off some of the shots that I took, not to mention the ones that Kassi got herself, which were fairly impressive. Dinner at the El Tovar was exceptional, I have to say. Love all that dark wood. No chance for any night photography due to the cloud cover which has chased us the whole trip so far. That’s actually been a blessing, as it’s tamped down the heat a bit on what we anticipated to be the hottest parts of the trip.
And just like that, I’m being called away again. Time to do more stuff. Lots happened in between, including trips to Zion and Arches!
Finally made it to Red Rock State Park, and made a couple of new discoveries along the way. Our route took us through what turned out be the incredibly beautiful Coconino National Forest, a place we have vowed to return. If Tolkien’s Elves were a real thing, they might just choose to live in a place like that. Verdant green forests around the bases of giant granite mountains, interspersed all along the way with little villages and expensive looking cabin retreats, with lights hanging from the trees across bridges that span crystal clear mountain streams. It was breathtaking. The city of Sedona begins in that place, and continues for quite a ways as you emerge out into the sunlight and the geography changes once again to drier, rockier terrain. I expected Sedona to be much cheesier than it is; like a sort of Disneyland for New Age bullshit. It was nothing of the sort.
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of psychics and crystal shops and vortex tour agencies and the like, but they don’t overwhelm what looks like a pretty resort town and what I imagine would be an interesting place to live.
The kids were excited to get hiking after spending most of two days in the car.
The problem was we were dealing with some serious looking storms on the horizon. We decided to risk a short hike, and I was able to take some decent photos of the park that I’ll be posting later.
Those are the Cathedral Rocks that the park is known for, and the ones we hiked to get a better vantage of. We dealt with some light rain along the way, but by the time we got to our overlook we could tell conditions were beginning to get worse. We made it back to the car with no time to spare. We hit hail and heavy rain, but thankfully the car took no damage.
We arrived earlier than expected in Williams and had a great buffet dinner with a decent Arizona margarita. Tomorrow we ride the rails to the Grand Canyon.
