A Blog In A Life: Joshua The Traveling Gnome sees the Grand Canyon and Meteor Crater

Have you ever hit 'backspace' and had everything you just wrote disappear? You'd think I'd learn by now. Man that bites! I will go play with Word for Windows and be back.....OK, here goes:

My husband got an extra day off so after some discussion, we decided to head east. (Save my life I'm going down for the last time...Hmmm....how many people will get that reference?) We made it to Flagstaff, Arizona, by dark and holed up in one of Route 66's finest lodging establishments. Can you say MAJOR RAIL LINE?! I thought a train was coming through our door every ten minutes through the night! AND, since our motel was next to an intersection, the trains just had to blow their horns to announce their arrivals. I could tell which ones were heading west and which were heading east by how loud the whistles were. It was tough.

We arose early--really no choice there, and continued to the Meteor Crater near Winslow, AZ (It's a girl my Lord, in a flat-bed Ford) I've cruised by this off of I-40 but had never stopped before. It's a really big hole! The boys liked it, but now it was my turn for yahoos as we returned west to the Walnut Canyon Sinagua ruins. I've seen many ancient ruins in this area but these might well be the most amazing. We had a bit of a hike to get to the island surrounded by old 'castle' houses, as Josh calls them. As these were all built very high and midway up huge cliffs, I pity the guy with a full bladder in the night! It took us about an hour to hike the loop and after the gazillion stairs up, we were starving! So we hopped back in our trusty ol' steel horse, heading south now through Oak Creek Canyon, to Sedona. We had lunch and stopped at my favorite store called Garland's Navajo Rugs. http://www.garlandsrugs.com/ I could spend a fortune there; come to think of it, I have.

We were running out of daylight so we high-tailed it again through Flagstaff and took the back road (hwy 180) to the Grand Canyon. Despite it being February and 7000' elevation, there was no snow. None on the San Francisco Peaks at 12,000 feet had any either. Ode to global warming. We arrived at the canyon rim at sunset and saw two elk and a herd of deer. I showed the boys where I'd hiked down Bright Angel Trail 7 years ago. (I was in much better shape and it still kicked my tail!) Kelsey has never been here before so it was great for me to see it with him. Joshua is always delighted in new places. It was getting quite dark and cold so we stayed at the Grand Canyon Inn for the night. It was much quieter than the night before, except for that bull-moose sleeping next to me.

After food, sleep, showers, and more food, we made it home by 12:30pm with roughly 750 miles under the tires. Oh, I think I forgot to mention the 3 Bighorn sheep and the herd of antelope that we saw on this trip too!