Northern Arizona Day 1

My first destination today was Jerome, AZ. I had never been there before but had heard some cool things about it. What a cool town. It's up on the side of a hill. It's an old mining town with tons of character. I visited the chamber of commerce visitors center to talk to them, pick up a brochure, and then walked around. The lady at the visitors center recommended the "Haunted Hamburger" as a place to eat lunch. She said I was the only person from Arizona that had visited them so far today. Everyone else was from somewhere else. I didn't stay long in Jerome, but had lunch, took a few pictures, and drove around a bit. This is definitely a place to come back to though.



this is the remains of a building from the mining days. There is a glass blowing shop inside it now. Next door is one of the old brothels. I am purposely not posting all my pictures (or for that matter very manny at all) since I'm connected with my Verizon card and the connection isn't too fast. Besides, I don't want to spend all my time processing pictures. I'd rather spend it taking them.

After Jerome, I drove up to Sedona. I spent most of my time at Red Rock Crossing taking pictures of the Cathedral Rocks.
This was me during a break in taking pictures.
Cathedral is in the background. I had to go change into shorts and sandals so I could walk through the water to get to some good spots.
I don't even know if this is one of the good pictures. I just picked one at random to upload tonight. But clearly this was a beautiful spot.
At about 5 o'clock, all the clouds had blown away from the Cathedral rocks. I was planning on staying there to get some good sunset shots with glowing clouds. However, once I realized the clouds were all gone, I had to boogey somewhere else to find a spot to capture the "magic light". I didn't know any other area in Sedona so I was kind of stressing. I drove through town and once again saw the chamber of commerce visitors building. When I went to it, it was closed. Time was running out. They had a couple of magazine dispensers outside with some free visitors guides in them. I quickly grabbed on and thumbed through it to see if I could figure out a place to go to see the sunset. I saw a reference to Schnebly Hill Vista and how it was a four wheel drive road. I figured no problem since I've got a 4x4 truck. I quickly started racing up the mountain on this trail but quickly realized it was going to take me a long time to go the 5 miles required to get to the vista. I probably averaged 6-8 miles an hour. And I had to abuse myself and my truck to even do that. I kept looking behind me at the light and I realized it was getting time. By the time I finally made it to the vista, the really good light was pretty much already gone. In retrospect, there were some good spots along the way that may have even been better, and I should have stopped there. Oh well. The picture above is one of the shotes I got once I got to the actual vista on top. From there I only had to drive another 6 miles on this road and I hit the I-17. I'm laying in the back of my truck right now in the parking lot of the Little America truck stop. I'm gonna go get some food and go to sleep.