What a great trip Marcia and I had in Arizona over the past two weeks! We flew direct from Des Moines to Phoenix. (You can’t go direct from DSM to many places of interest, so that’s a big plus for the Grand Canyon State as long as we have to get from here to there). Our trips this winter are to suss out possible warm(er) weather climates, because we’re just about Upper Midwested Out at this point. Toward that end, we’ve generally been renting apartments or houses as we travel to get some small sense of what it’s like to actually live in a place, rather than just being in a place.

We spent time in Phoenix, Tempe, Florence, Sedona, Flagstaff, Cottonwood, Prescott and various point between and around those towns, and also made a trek up to Grand Canyon Village to see the big attraction there. And Holy Moly, is it BIG! (Or, perhaps even, Grand, if you prefer). Marcia and I both added “Hike down to bottom of Grand Canyon from rim, and back” to our bucket lists. Hopefully we get that one sooner rather than later, wow! Cottonwood and Flagstaff were probably the biggest surprises to us in terms of places that we didn’t know much about, but really liked and that would put us close enough to Sedona (which we love) without having to contend with Sedona crowds/traffic and expenses on a regular basis. We’re loosely thinking we will head back out that way in May to do a bit more poking about.

We had great weather the whole time we were there (cold up north in the mornings, but that’s okay so long as the sun comes out later in the day), and did at least one, sometimes two, good hikes per day, pretty much every day. My phone pedometer says I walked about 200,000 steps over the past two weeks (95 miles); not the most I’ve done in a two-week period, but still a credible trekking tour, given some of the climbing that was involved in getting up to the good stuff. We also had a lot of great meals (Flagstaff was dynamite on that front), and got to see some family and friends, which always makes things nice(r).

A great trip, overall. Feeling very warm (no pun intended) about Arizona at this point. As always, I snapped and snapped and snapped away with my camera, and if you want to see some more of that, it’s over at my usual Flickr repository. You can go directly to the Arizona Album by clicking the snap of Marcia taking a peek over the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, below. Close. But not too close.

That’s a long way down, that is . . .