OUT WEST ADVENTURES Walnut canyon, Sedona, Flagstaff, Lowell Observatory

The day is loosely planned.  We'll go to Walnut Canyon, a vortex area around Sedona, get lunch somewhere and see what unfolds from there.

The description of the trail down to the dwellings at Walnut Canyon National Monument is strenuous.  Yet, the person in the visitor's center encouraged us to do it.  There are 185 steps down to the Island trail where one can see the cave dwellings up close and personal.  We all decide to go for it and were glad we did.
Walnut Canyon is a site where Sinagua cliff dwellers lived from about 1100 to 1250 CE.   We could see more dwellings across the canyon.

 Some rooms were used for storage of water and grains and others were used for living spaces.  They developed a system for drawing smoke from an inside fire to the outside.  There is evidence that they cultivated vegetables at the rim of the canyon and that they were quite knowledgable about medicinal plants that they grew in the area.
We did rest on the way back up to the Visitor's center.

A nice diorama in the visitor's center of a depiction of life in the canyon.

ON TO SEDONA AREA

We took the Oak Creek Canyon road to Sedona which was very beautiful and popular.  It was a Saturday and many people were parked along the sides of the road to enjoy playing and picnicking along the creek.
Nick was the only one who had been to Sedona before so we didn't know quite what to expect.  It probably would have been quite nice on a week day but on Saturday it was crawling with people and no place to park.  We drove on through town to Bell Rock which is considered to be an energy vortex spot.  People were hot and hungry and basically not into it.

We continued to the next town which would take us back towards Flagstaff for lunch.  The place that sounded good from the reviews closed 30 minutes before we got there.  Betsy wanted a milkshake and there was an ice cream, hot dog place just around the corner.  We walked there but the problem was that they didn't have anything that wasn't beef for Jorge.  The rest of us had shakes or floats and some had hot dogs.  I had noticed a local artist gallery just a block up the street.  After lunch, we went to the gallery and Jorge went across the street to get a salad at Wendy's.
A person who does batiks was there and quite talkative.  I bought a few of her note cards.

People were tired and wanting to get back to the house and cook dinner.  The plan was to take people back to the house and Nick and I would then go back to Flagstaff to go to the Lowell Observatory.  When others realized that would mean an extra 2 hours of driving, we all decided to have dinner in Flagstaff and all go to the observatory.  Betsy found a groupon for the observatory which saved us all some dollars.
Flagstaff turned out to be a pretty cool, happening place.  We planned to poke around in some galleries and then have dinner.  The only problem was that the galleries all closed at 5:00 and we got parked about 5:05.  We decided it was too hard to try to stay together so picked a meeting place for an hour and went our separate ways.  Outside the little shopping area they were setting up for some music and outside movie.  Nick and I walked through that area and found a rock and crystal shop that was open.  Myra had mentioned she might get some rocks for the grandkids so we thought we would make sure to go back there with Myra.  Then we found the coolest shop ever.  It was a store with musical instruments of a spiritual sort.  The best was a wooden chair with harp type of strings along the sides.  When I asked about it, the owner of the store invited me to sit down in it and he would demonstrate  Oh my!  Stress from the day melted away as I was transported to a place of peace.  We had to bring the others back here!

After we were all de-stressed, we went across the street for a quick Korean dinner before going to the Lowell Observatory.  Since we hadn't planned on going to the observatory, people didn't have warm jackets as the temperatures started to drop.  Luckily, it wasn't as cold as when we looked at the stars up at Cedar Breaks.   First we listened to a very enthusiastic young woman give a lecture on the planets.  Nick and I then went out to look through several of the telescopes that were set up.  

Lowell Observatory is one of the oldest observatories in the United States, built in 1894.  It is where Pluto was discovered.  One of their telescopes was the main one used to map the moon for the moon landing.  Now it is used for education rather than research.  

It was really cool to see how the structure around the telescope was engineered.  The telescope is designed to track what it is set on but the opening is stationary.  When the telescope gets to the edge of the opening, they rotate the whole dome slightly.  

We stay until about 10:00 which gets us back to the house about 11:00. After a glass of wine, everyone went to bed knowing that we would have to pack up and head out in the morning.  Nick said he would like to be on the road by 8:00 but there was a general wave of "NO WAY!"  So when, we changed it to 9:00 that sounded quite reasonable.  We were on the road just before 9:00 the next morning.  Not bad!