(Sorry highlight people, but the vacation vote was 8 to 3 in favor of details and minutia. If that’s not your thing? Check back with me in a month. Maybe longer… it was a helluva trip!)
We started out at zero dead thirty.

Yes, that’s 12 minutes after 2 in the morning…. not my finest hour. I’m a chronic insomniac and usually don’t fall asleep before 1:00, so you can imagine how pretty I was leaving for the airport.

Delta did their best to make me feel special, but all I felt like was a zombie. (Probably looked like one too.) Did I mention I went for a slight trim before the trip and came back minus 10 inches of hair?

It used to be halfway down my back, so on what planet is this a trim? No more ponytail bad hair days for me. Anyway…
I’m one of those annoying fliers who has to sit by the window and gawk at our world from on high. It never ceases to amaze me…

Soaring above big fluffy clouds…

And little puffy clouds…

And mountains that look like crumpled paper… it never gets old. Airplane magazines however, do. I have to say I never realized their target audience was bald people.

Every other ad seemed to be about regrowing hair.

Sure, my hair can go to the gym… just leave the rest of me home on the couch and we’ll be fine.
We landed in Atlanta, which is always a zoo…. and I had to laugh at this hotel that was right on the runway.

Hell, I complain when I hear cars in the parking lot below my room… who needs a disembarking 747?

I’ve never been out west before and was oddly fascinated with the patchwork topography.

Crop circles? Or giant Pac Mans…?

The mountains meeting the desert was pretty impressive.

Phoenix? Not so much. Sorry, but I hate your airport. It’s not laid out well and the fact that your rental cars are miles away which force me to slog my giant stone filled luggage aboard a shuttle bus and sit like a stuffed sardine in cramped seats with a driver who takes pleasure in turning too tightly and seeing all his passengers flung from side to side is not my idea of a good time.

But I did get a kick out of Arizona cowboys…

Who apparently wear two hats at a time.
Driving out of Phoenix was a traffic nightmare and again, sorry Phoenix… but ugly. Brown, flat and boring. Though they did try to perk it up with some interesting highway rock art.



The overpasses were painted as well…


So kudos for the beautification attempt Phoenix. Leaving the city made me smile because I spotted my first cactus…

I was giddy!

For a Yankee girl like me, this is exotic stuff!

There were veritable cactus forests springing up alongside the road. Squeeeeee!! This is what I think of when I envision the southwest.

That, and scary badass road names.
All too soon the cactus disappeared and things turned brown again.

But then…

They started to turn red….

And I knew we were getting close to Sedona.
