Sedona Date

Today Rusty took me on a day date to Sedona for hiking and downtowning. We set out in the morning and hiked a beautiful trail called Devil's Bridge, which is a hike into a small canyon and up a set of natural sandstone steps to a rock arch that you can walk across and explore. With all that beauty surrounding me, my favorite moment should have been when a twittering blue jay landed in a nearby tree or when the silence and grandeur of the red rocks overtook me... but truth be told, my favorite moment of the hike was buying the parking permit!

We hadn't realised we even NEEDED a parking permit, so neither of us had cash on hand, but we made it work. The permits are bought through a vending machine, and luckily we scrounged five dollars in DIMES AND NICKELS from the bottoms of each of our wallets. I stayed in the car and Rusty took our bag full of coins to the machine. A sweet elderly man already standing at the machine allowed Rusty to go before him because he didn't understand how to work the machine. Rusty warned him " I have coins", but the man said "Oh please, it's only five dollars, go ahead"...probably under the impression that it was $5 in quarters. Rusty then proceeded to deposit nickel after painful nickel for the next SEVERAL minutes, with the man calling him names jokingly like "oh you bugger" and making faces behind his back, laughing with me about the misfortune and our pitiful, scrounged $5...which actually turned out to be only $4.90, so Rusty had to borrow a dime from the old man.

Anyway, the hike was gorgeous and peaceful, a great adventure to start off the first day of SUMMER!!!! After the hike, we strolled downtown, ate lunch and got ice cream. Here are a FEW of the pictures from today. I'll see if I can't put together a photo album to be available if yall want to see more.

A rock. They have a lot of these.

Proof that I didn't exaggerate about Sedona's culture last week





Me on the Devil's arch and Rusty climbing a ginormous cliffhanger rock.