Official Sedona Trip Report - PART I

Whew! Now that was a whirlwind trip! We had an absolutely fantastic time. And we played so hard we were ready to crash out by 10:00 at night, despite our preliminary planning of looking for live music each night.

On Wednesday night, we took the boys to Grandma and Grandpa's, then headed to Milwaukee. We spent the night in the ultra-lush Super 8, then got up early for our flight to Phoenix. The flight was uneventful (thankfully) and we arrived in Phoenix around 10:30 am. We got our rental car and headed to Sedona. It was almost a 2 hour drive, but it was fun to watch the change in scenery as we climbed in elevation. I could feel the elevation change as soon as we got off the plane - very weird.

As we reached Sedona, it was just amazing how beautiful it was. All of a sudden the landscape was just littered with deep red rocks. Amazing. We checked into our B&B, which was built on the side of Castle Rock. The owner of the B&B is an avid hiker, so he gave us recommendations for "must-dos" in the area. We decided we would do a lot of hiking, but Thursday afternoon we would explore downtown Sedona and go shopping. Heh. My husband doesn't like to put up with shopping, but he did and we actually had a great time.

We then grabbed a beer and took in some views. We tried cactus french fries and well, they weren't so good, but we were glad we tried them. We had dinner at the Redstone Cabin and it was delicious (expensive, but delicious).

Friday morning we had an amazing breakfast at the B&B, then took off hiking. We first went to Cathedral Rock. It is only .7 miles to the saddle, but was supposed to be a challenging hike with "kodak moment" views. Boy is that an understatement. It was about 9:00 am when we got there and it was still a bit icy. That was scary in a couple of spots where the climbing was steep, but it was gorgeous and so much FUN! I had never hiked like that before and I was in hog heaven. We also discovered that we came to Sedona at exactly the right time. While we heard some of the trails could get very crowded, we had Cathedral Rock all to ourselves. And the weather was perfect for hiking - low 50s.

We spent about an hour and a half on Cathedral Rock although I could have spent days. Oh yeah, and in case you have never heard of it (I hadn't), Sedona is famous for its "vortexes." This is some special energy source that is supposedly measureable. It affects people in different ways and attracts all sorts of New Age/healing type people. While I definitely do not fit into that category, it was fun to look for the vortexes, which were often seen by finding juniper trees that looked twisted like taffy. It was fun.