Back home after nearly a month on the road. We travelled 6500 miles, drove through ten states, visited friends and family, drank beer and smoked cigars, ate wonderful meals, viewed three national parks on a very limited basis. Countryside ranged from desert to high mountains, with rain, hail, and sandstorms to accompany the sun and pleasures of the summer. Even better, we go along! One of Josh’s friends said, “It must be love if you can spend weeks in a car with your wife.” We had a great time – and time not to just travel, but time to get reacquainted with each other.
The first leg of the trip was to Flagstaff, Arizona. We spent one night here on the way out, and another two nights on the way back, in a different section of town. It was about a 7-hour drive from home, which is just north of Los Angeles. The first part was a few hours simply getting out of the sprawl of L.A., but once out, we moved into the sprawling Mojave desert as we travelled east. The Mojave is an amazing area – very large, very diverse, ranging from flat and barren, odd mountainous formations, to a sparse lushness with oddities such as the Joshua Tree, which, interestingly, is related to the lily!
Of course, geology changes as one travels, and moving into Arizona, the land certainly did change, especially as we began the ascent into the city of Flagstaff. The first night of the trip was spent in downtown, in an old hotel called the Hotel Monte Vista. We were up on the fourth floor, but on a Saturday night, we could hear the noise from the street below, and the chiming of a local church bell, tolling the hours in the wee hours of the morning (which was off by about 35 minutes, I think). The noise was not distracting, though, and the hotel is centrally located, so walking everywhere was fun. We visited 3 breweries that evening, and found out that trains travel through the middle of downtown with alarming frequency. The view from our window – we stayed in the Walter Brennan Room – was pretty cool. And, better, the windows opened!
The initial impressions of Flagstaff were very favorable. For a small town, it is rather cosmopolitan, and this is, in part, because of the fact Northern Arizona State University is there. There were also some shocks – Arizona’s gun laws and politics are vastly different than what I am used to in California. For instance, signs in restaurant windows telling customers to leave their guns at home, was a significant reminder of the differences.
Certainly food for thought . . . so, for now, I will leave you with Josh pondering a menu on the patio of Beaver Street Brewery.
Ink, Yarn & Beer 