more colorful rocks

On Sunday morning, we returned to Petrified Forest National Park to look at the Painted Desert in the morning light. Amazing. The hills were all shades of red and pink, and the park was empty (so even quieter and more peaceful). We stopped by the few overlooks we didn't check out on Saturday, and caught some great views of petrified forests. Incredible stuff.

After leaving Petrified Forest/Painted Desert and meandering through Holbrook (where we'd stayed the night before), a town that doesn't have much besides a railroad crossing and a LOT of dinosaur statues, we intended to visit Meteor Crater and check out Flagstaff. We stopped at Meteor Crater only to discover that it's not particularly cheap to get in. Could we have afforded it? Probably. Did we want to? No. We were offended by the blatant ripping off of tourists, so we continued on our merry way, and on a whim decided to check out Sedona instead.

Still got to see a big hole in the ground!

Sedona is absolutely lovely. It was pretty chilly in Flagstaff, looking so nice and wintery with pine trees and snow. We began the drive from Flag to Sedona and were happily surprised to find that the squiggly lines on Google maps was a gorgeous, winding road down into Oak Creek Canyon.


View Larger Map

The temperature jumped and it felt like spring. We enjoyed having the windows down and driving through the cute downtown area of Sedona, full of fun looking shops and restaurants. We decided to go to Red Rock State Park (over Slide Rock State Park, and good that we did, because apparently the main attraction there is playing in the river, which it wasn't quite warm enough for). That was a good whimsical decision.

Red Rock State Park is full of really great trails, and obviously, red rocks. They are beautifully maintained without being paved and excessively manufactured looking. We basically hiked the perimeter of the trails, probably 3-4 miles. It was beautiful. Stunning views, cool lizards and birds, bobcat scat (which we proudly identified correctly using our own logic of, it's fuzzy, so something that eats other fuzzy things, and it looks like cat poop), lots of cacti and trees, with a little stream running through (SO nice to be by water).

We stopped by a brewery in town and had a flight of samples of some great stuff before having dinner at a sandwich place and heading up to Flagstaff for the night. That windy road was less fun at night, but the infinite number of stars and the moonlight glowing on the snow as we gained elevation was pretty cool.