Wednesday, March 30, 2011
CORNVILLE, AZ — “Wow” was the word of the day today, as we drove northward from our RV park into Sedona and on to Flagstaff. If this is a hint of what’s to come when we get to the Grand Canyon, we’d better start looking for new words! “Wow” isn’t going to do it!
Under a sparkling blue sky, towering upwards in majestic silence, the rock formations in stripes of red, tan, peach, and white provided a stunning backdrop for the bustling town of Sedona. It almost seemed sacrilegious to have a McDonalds or a Safeway store going about its mundane business at street level with such other-worldly monoliths behind them.
The town of Sedona appears to have taken its spectacular setting into some consideration, because the popular hamburger chain displayed only a small, green pair of arches in front of this franchise instead of the massive golden ones we see in other locations. So there must be some kind of street design code to keep the commercial expressions from upstaging their extraordinary natural environs.
Val and I were reminded of Banff and Jasper, where the Rocky Mountains loom behind the day-to-day activities of souvenir-selling, tour-arranging and tourist-trapping. There was a very similar feel here! We stopped at a couple of tourist information places and scooped up pamphlets and maps to help us plan our stay. There is a lot to see; we’re booked at LoLoMai Springs for a week for starters, and we’ll go from there.
Day One in the area was more or less a survey visit. We drove from the south end to the north end of Sedona and then followed the scenic Highway 89A along its winding, narrow route toward Flagstaff. As we continued, constantly climbing from 4,500 to 7,000 feet, we understood why we’d been given the advice, by a tourist we had chatted with in Tucson, not to take the trailer with us along this route. The hairpin turns and steep grades would have been next to impossible with the trailer in tow! Especially toward the end when the road maintenance seemed to have deteriorated to the point of potholes.
Nevertheless, the trip in both directions offered amazing vistas of mountains and rock formations and even, as we got to the higher elevations, patches of snow by the side of the road (you should have heard Val groan!). The air became much fresher, dropping from 74 degrees in Sedona to 63 once we got to Flagstaff.
Val said Flagstaff had a northern feel to it. It has a charming old town centre with little shops and restaurants, and the buildings are what we’re accustomed to seeing at home, as opposed to the many adobe structures with tile rooves that we saw in Phoenix and Tucson. There were lots of tall Ponderosa pine trees, and daffodils and blossoming fruit trees in people’s gardens.
We treated ourselves to a leisurely browse in a huge Barnes & Noble bookstore, as we’ve both been enjoying time to read in the evenings and needed to replenish our supply. We also tried to pick up some RV supplies at a brand new Camping World store that had just opened, according to the flyer Val had picked up, but when we reached it, past the northern outskirts of Flagstaff, we found a sign on the door that said “store temporarily closed”. Oh well.
Our reward for the trip north was the trip south, back to the campground, seeing all the wonderful sights from the other direction that we had passed earlier. Spectacular doesn’t begin to describe it.
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