The good thing about driving a lot in a single day is that you get places way faster. The bad thing is that you're then too tired to do much in the places where you arrive. Today was a medium-long day -- we left the hotel in Santa Fe at 8:30am MDT and arrived at the hotel in Sedona at 5pm PDT, which is shorter than my epic solo drives across Nevada, Utah, Wyoming and Nebraska, but still longer than anyone should spend in a car.
Still, we saw some pretty cool stuff. On the way out of Santa Fe, we drove through downtown and went to the Loretto Chapel. It's home to the 'miraculous staircase', which was built by a mysterious carpenter in the 1870s after the nuns prayed for a solution to the fact that there were no stairs to access to choir loft in their church and no room to build stairs (according to the recording in the chapel, choir lofts were built without stairs because most choirs at the time were male -- but while men could use ladders, that wasn't particularly dignified for the nuns). The carpenter built a spiral staircase with no center support beam and two 360' turns (and no banister, which would have been frightening; the nuns hired someone else to put one in later), which was quite lovely whether it was a miracle or not.
After Santa Fe, we hightailed it west, barely stopping as we crossed New Mexico and entered Arizona. We took a detour that made our drive an hour longer, but it was worth it -- we drove through Petrified Forest National Park, which was totally lovely in a v. desolate kind of way. But, we weren't prepared for how absolutely gorgeous Sedona (and the descent from Flagstaff to Sedona) is. I had forced my brother to drive for forty-five minutes before we reached Flagstaff, since I was having trouble staying awake, but I'm glad that we switched in Flagstaff (and that I was awake to see everything) -- the giant ponderosa pine trees and towering red rocks are one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. The descent was treacherous, and my GPS clearly got confused by the constant switchbacks (since we were often directly above another portion of the highway on which we would later be going the opposite direction, so it kept wanting us to make u-turns), but it was all v. lovely.
Needless to say, Sedona has utterly replaced Santa Fe in my fickle affections, and I'm going to have to come back here posthaste. It would be an awesome place to do a writer's retreat. As it is, we don't really have time to explore; it was a little too late to start hiking or anything tonight, and our priority tomorrow is to get to the Grand Canyon and walk around there. But, we did have some great Mexican food -- in our quest to see the regional variations of Mexican cuisine, we had it again tonight (which may be overkill). I had a totally fantastic chile relleno (actually, I had two, but I could only finish one -- if I feel like having a cold chile relleno for breakfast, it's sitting in the fridge), and my brother's fajitas were apparently good too. And then we came back to the hotel, I took care of some romance blogging stuff, we both made use of the free and ample wireless connection, and watched some Conan.
And now, although it's only ten p.m. in the Pacific timezone, I'm going to go to bed; the drive tomorrow should only be a couple of hours, but I want to be awake enough to enjoy the Grand Canyon. Goodnight!
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