Vacation Summary Installment Deux

So after we finished walking around the beautiful city of Santa Fe, and after I reassured (with my toes crossed) my Dear that I was perfectly fine to travel cross-country, we proceeded to leave Santa Fe. However, the dear hadn’t been inside a Best Buy for a couple months. Every time we visit a city of any decent size, we make an obligatory stop at Best Buy. The Santa Fe Best Buy was surprisingly easy to find. In fact, it was quite close to the Motel 6 that drove me to tears the night before.

Here we are, two people, driving a thousand miles from home, with no real destination in mind day to day without as much as an atlas. What better to buy than XM? Tom Tom. Or Tomasina as I call her. The British lass who instructs me to turn right and take the Moto-way.

We then headed to the nearest Starbucks and set up Tom Tom. This system is EXCELLENT! Quite user friendly. Great price (we got the smallest one for $250.00). Excellent features. Absolute life saver! My new travel BFF.

Since I chose the first destination on our vacation, the Dear chose the second. And so off to the big hole we went.

Now that the car was loaded up with XM and Tom Tom, the drive was excellent. It was such a beautiful drive. I have lived in Kansas or the Houston area most of my life. I now live in oil fields. I am not accustomed to mountains. I was in awe. And have a lot of pictures to prove it.



We stopped in Flagstaff for the night. At the scariest hotel I have ever stayed at. Which is saying a lot. This is the hotel where you can lay on the bed and see the can. The hotel where if you are over 5’ 10”, you cannot pee standing up or take a shower normally. I think the only reason I slept is that I was still ill. Thank goodness for bad guac! And the price? A mere $75.00 for the worst hotel room ever. The most we spent during our entire vacation was $95 for the first night in Vegas. Out of 7 nights in hotels, this one ranked #2 in cost. Grr.

The following morning, we woke and began our drive to the Grand Canyon. But then we got hungry and with the help of Tom Tom, headed to downtown Flagstaff for some grub. The downtown area is so neat! It has been renovated with a ton of restaurants, pubs and cool stores. We wandered that for an hour or two. Flagstaff is at a high elevation which creates a wonderfully cool environment. Besides having the scariest expensive hotel around, Flagstaff seemed to be a wonderful city that, should we be required to spend more time in desert climates, I wouldn’t mind living in.

I don’t know, however, if Flagstaff can properly be called desert. There are a million pine trees, reminding me of the East Texas piney woods around Nacogdoches. They have a ski season. And it wasn’t the same temperature as the surface of the sun. Not too desert-y, in my opinion.

Anyhoo, after wasting more time, we headed to the Grand Canyon. The portion of the Canyon that we hit was called Desert View.





And has been previously seen, we stopped at a weird little tourist spot on the way, Yabba Dabba Doo!



We stayed at the Canyon for a couple hours. There was a storm blowing in to the East. We watched that roll in.



And then….we kept going west. With one city in mind.