Cathedral Rock and artsy trees near Sedona

Friday evening Greg and I went down to see Cathedral Rock and to wander randomly....

yet even more pictures

Here is some pictures from today. Greg and I went hiking in Boyton Canyon, which is a 2.5 mile (one way) trail. We started in the morning, so there was still some frost on all the shrubs, and later on we were walking through snow. It was a bit sketchy in places, but the trail was generally flat, so there wasn't any risk of falling off a cliff or anything like that.

More pictures from Southwest trip

Here are a few more pictures from the first few days of the Southwest roadtrip...

First few days of Southwest roadtrip

This post will be somewhat short. I am having difficulty understanding how the blogging software is working with the Mac I am using instead my usual Windows based PC.

I arrived in Phoenix Tuesday afternoon. Dinner was at a local Mexican restaurant with Greg, and his brother Mark's family. Wednesday morning, we hopped in the car and headed north on Arizona Highway 89, heading towards Prescott. The drive was a curvy road up and over a mountain pass. There was a thin covering of snow on all the trees and rocks, and I have a cool picture, but I can't figure out how to upload it right now.

We stayed the evening in Prescott, in a hotel that looked out over the park that surrounded the county courthouse. It was an old hotel, and it had the "2nd oldest elevator in the state" according to the guy showing us around. I enjoyed staying in a building with such history. The name of the hotel was St. Michael's hotel. Prescott has a comfortable ambience to it, very laid back. If I could find a job there, it would be a great place to live. The mountains surround it on all sides. The only surreal part was that it is a retirement area, Greg and I were the youngest people walking around, and we aren't too young anymore.

The next morning (today), we drove north again and passed through the former mining town of Jerome. It sits perched on the side of a cliff, and the road through town goes through a few switch backs and creates city blocks. To get from one main street to the next, you have to climb stairs. The mine closed down in the 50's, and the town started falling apart, but recently it has been rediscovered by artists, who are renovating it. It was a cute town, I am not sure I would enjoy going there on a busy summer weekend, there is only one road in and out.

After Jerome, we continued on to Sedona. Sedona is beautiful. And the people are friendly, especially the ones trying to get you to accept a free evening at a resort and listen to their 90 minute pitch about buying a time share. I naively listened to one guy for about 10 minutes and was all signed up for the next day until I realized that it was a time share sales job. 1/2 an hour later, I stumbled upon another booth where it looked like tourist information with a very helpful person, but it turned out it was a sales pitch. The rest of the people of Sedona are very nice people. And the surrounding mountains are amazing. The pictures with this posting are from Sedona. One is the view from our hotel balcony, the other is from a scenic lookout near the airport.