Day Four - Hiking to Vultee Arch

Thursday we had beautiful weather.

We got up and had breakfast. Michael made eggs and bagels for me, eggs and bread+hummus for himself as I browsed the Sedona trail book for a place to go hiking for the day.

We decided upon the Vultee Arch Trail and left the house around 10AM.

The route to the trail took us down Forest Road 152, which was 4.5 miles of rocky, dirt road that we weren't entirely sure about bringing the convertible on but we took it slow, the entire 4.5 miles taking about a half hour to traverse. Once we arrived at the trail head we realized that we were driving the only car that made it down that far, the rest of the vehicles were Jeeps.

We started on the trail, which I misread as being about a mile long one way, it was 1.7 with our the camera, backpack and some water bottles. The trail was of moderate difficulty, lots of walking on rocky soil and dried river/stream-beds. Parts of the forest looked slightly New Englandish with the pine needles and pine cones covering the forest floor. But there was no mistaking the red rocks in the background for somewhere in New England - sometimes we'd be so intent on looking where we were walking for fear of tripping over a rock or root that we'd forget to look up for 10 minutes, and then we'd see that a new, magnificent rock formation above us had come into view.

When we finally arrived close to the end of the trail Michael was the first one to notice the arch itself off in the distance - beautiful! By this time in the hike we were feeling a bit tired, but all that disappeared when we saw the arch and climbed the rocks closer to it. It was well worth the hike.

After spending a little over a half hour at the arch, soaking it all in, we made the trek back to the car. The walk back was pleasant, both of us feeling energized by achieving our goal. We got back to the car around 1:40 and drove back the 4.5 miles to the main road, stopping several times along the way to take more photos of the red rocks.

Once back on the main road we decided to go out to a late lunch at a local place I saw advertising gourmet pizza. I love pizza but I'm pretty hard to impress. This place, Picazzo's impresssed me. Their menu had some amazing appetizers on it: wings, hummus platter, roasted garlic and brie, caprese, baked portabello, garlic cheese bread, where do I begin? It's rare (never happened before?) that an entire appetizer menu matches my pallet so perfectly. We went with the roasted garlic and brie, it was fantastic. Their pizza menu was more impressive, with an array of delicious looking pizza selections, plus the most impressive "design your own pizza" list I've ever seen. Not only can you design a simple red or white pizza, there was a whole list of sauces you could use! When it came to ordering Michael got a Mediterranean with chicken, which came looking amazing, they didn't just throw some chicken on top of a Mediterranean like we so often see, it was fully integrated into the pizza. In the interest of comparitive science I decided to go with the same pizza I always get at traditional pizza places, red sauce, mozzerella, pepperoni and bell peppers. And what a pizza it was! A perfect thickness of crust (on the thin side), a perfect amount of pepperoni grease, a generous portion of peppers! Oh gosh this pizza was good.

We left Picazzos around 3:30 and headed back to the house to chill out. Michael ended up going up to the Bashas, the third of three grocery stores in town and the only one we hadn't been to yet. He picked up some cookies (yay!) and upon checking out their beer selection was impressed to discover they had Lindemans Framboise in the big bottles! As well as Chimay, Rogue, and others. He brought me home a bottle of the Framboise and a nice bottle of wine.

As the evening crept up, we sat down to watch The Triangle. It was one of a few movies we bought used at the video store a couple days before, and figured it'd be a good bad scifi movie. We were not disappointed. We finished the first two parts before I got sleepy around 9PM and went to bed.