This past weekend, Habib and I took a road trip to go see Sedona and the Grand Canyon. I have to rank it up there with my favorite trips ever.
Sedona is place in northern Arizona with beautiful rocky mountains that have been stripped and given interesting shapes over millions of years of exposure to the elements. The mountains are basically giant red rocks, because it's iron rich. As Habib drove, four hours after we had left Tucson, and we started to see red everywhere, I got super excited. I actually began squealing, oh my goshing (yes I made the verb up), and jumping in my seat like a 2 year old hopped up on sugar. Habib of course kept saying, "ya benit, roo2i! Ba3d ma wsolna."
It was so nice there. The little picturesque artisan and touristy village. The scenery was amazing. We drove up one of the mountains, parked, got out of the car, and snagged prime real estate on a cliff's edge to take pictures. At that point it was around 4:45 or so, and there was probably only 5 or 6 other people there. As sunset drew near, the people came. By sunset, several dozen people had showed up to take a picture of the red mountains at sunset from one of the best view points. Out came the tri-pods and expensive DSLR's with their fancy lenses. It was time to get that two thousand dollar investment's worth. I definitely gave my new camera a work out. I took pictures from every angle and side. I was so happy. It's not everyday I get to watch the sun set in such beautiful location, sitting among 50 other people all marvelling at the same thing. It's such a peaceful wonderful thing.
After the sun set, we drove to our hotel in the Grand Canyon. It was night time by then, and we checked in and slept early after watching a couple of movies, because there wasn't much else to do. So next morning, we woke up early. Very early. We actually kept trying to go back to sleep, until we gave up around 7 am, and just got up. Breakfast, check out, and drive to the Grand Canyon. The national park is nice and you drive through it for quite a bit among the pine tree forests. And then I caught a glimpse of canyon from the car. I freaked out a little. Once again, Habib said, "settle down, ba3d ma wsolna!" I got even more excited than I did over Sedona.
I've seen the Grand Canyon before, in pictures, in movies, on a variety of National Geographic documentaries. Not one of those was truly capable of capturing the enormous vastness of this very beautiful canyon. It's almost beyond comprehension. My jaw actually dropped when I stood on the edge of the cliff and got my first good look. I have never seen anything this big before. In fact, it's so big and stretches out into the horizon, that taking a picture, while nice, completely loses the 3 dimensional perspective that is so impressive. But take pictures I did. A lot of them. We hiked for a few miles, and took the shuttle the rest of the way and stopped at the different points, to see the canyon from different angles.
When we were finally we done, 6 and a half hours later, we were exhausted. We drove back, and luckily it wasn't night this time, so I got to see the drive from the Grand Canyon to Sedona during the late afternoon to sunset. It was some of the most beautiful scenery I've seen. Just plains and rolling hills of whitish yellowish grass, and contrasting green shrubs, as far as the eye can see. And of course, as always in Arizona, mountains all along the horizon in the distance.
I took over 400 pictures. I spent today deleting the bad ones and trimming them down to 250. I'll probably trim them down some more, hopefully to under 200 before I figure out what to post online.
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