Day One - Arrival and relaxation

Sunday evening Michael and I packed everything for our trip and headed out to Michael's mothers house. We met up with Juliana (who did the photography at the wedding) and picked up our nice camera.

We spent the night at Michael's mothers and visited with Caligula (who we'd dropped off Friday night before the wedding) and at 4AM we hit the train station not too far from her house to catch the train to the airport.

The Philadelphia airport was busy but I think we're getting used to the additional hassle flying is these days. Our flight left at 7:15AM EST. There was a delay because of some on runway repairs they needed to do on the plane before takeoff. We arrived in Phoenix at 10AM Phoenix time.

The Phoenix airport is a nice one, they recently built a new rental car office outside the actual airport area which we needed to take a 10 minute shuttle bus too. It's a very nice setup, once we got the rental car getting onto route 17 was a surprisingly simple task. And although the line was a bit long at Enterprise, all the people working there were efficient and really knew how to deal with customers and do their job well, that always makes things so much more pleasant.

Our rental car is a convertible Chrysler Sebring. Woohoo convertible! We sort of wish it had more power, it had trouble keeping up with the 75MPH on route 17 with the crosswinds, but it's not a horrible car. Convertibles are nice.

We stopped for lunch around 1PM at the Rock Spring Cafe and Saloon. We weren't expecting much (we're not too into cafes) but it turned out to be a nice little place.

Throughout the drive we remained somewhat unconvinced about Arizona. Neither of us are really desert people, and although cactuses are neat and the landscape is pretty we weren't really blown away by anything - until we reached Sedona.

The house we're staying at has some amazing views, it's just gorgeous here! The temperature was perfect, the sky only had a few clouds. Plus, the house is amazing. It's perched on the side of a mountain, overlooking a valley. I keep trying to find a good place to take a picture of the house, but the way it's built and perched just doesn't lend itself to that, any angles I can get of it really wouldn't give it justice.

After settling in we headed up the street to New Frontiers Natural Marketplace (very similar to Whole Foods back home) to get some groceries. After shopping we came back to the house and Michael made pasta w/ mushrooms and put together a cheese plate to enjoy.

Both of us were pretty exhausted by the time 8PM creeped up, a combination of the time change, all the traveling we did over the weekend, the wedding, and only getting 4 hours of sleep Sunday night. So we went to bed early.

I could stay here forever, quit my job, Michael will telecommute (they have cable internet here, but we decided to keep use to a minimum for the trip).