Arizona vacation 2005 April 29
I left early on Tuesday morning, April 19 for my trip to Arizona with my father. We flew out of Philadelphia and had a pleasant and uneventful flight. We did have to make a change in Cleveland, but everything went smoothly.
Once we landing in Philly we got our bags and checked into the Dollar rental car place. We reserved an intermediate car. Once we got to the rental car lot on the shuttle bus they let us choose our own cars from the different sections reserved for each “class” of car. It turns out that a Jeep Wrangler is a intermediate car according to the Phoenix Dollar rent-a-car people, so that is what we selected. The jeep ran good the whole time. The only disappointing thing was the manual was in the form of a VHS tape. We didn’t have a VHS-player so we couldn’t look at the manual so we decided not to take the soft top off in case we couldn’t figure out what we were doing. I’m sure if you know what your doing though it is easy. I didn’t actually figure out the gas millage but it seemed to do decently in that category.
Once we got in the jeep, we headed up to Jerome for lunch. Jerome was a ghost town not to far from Sedona, It is now a tourist/artsy town with some neat shops and restaurants. We had very tasty Burgers from the Haunted Hamburger. After lunch we went to Sedona and checked into the Slide Rock Lodge. We have stayed there before. The rooms are nice and clean and the people that run the place are very friendly. If you don’t care too much about amentities like a television it is a nice place to stay.
Wednesday we went fishing in the Oak Creek Canyon. I didn’t do so good, but my dad caught a bunch of trout in the morning (and of course out them back). In the afternoon I went to the spot he found and caught a bunch. Thursday we took the Jeep down a few dirt roads for site seeing and we also did an approximately 3.4 mile hike (total, 1.7 each way). We fished a little in the evening but only caught 1 trout.
Friday we woke up and drove down to Phoenix to go to the races. Read my previous posts for info about that. We planned to fly out Monday in case Saturday night at the track rained out (which, it came close to doing), so we had Sunday free.
We went to the Heard Museum in the morning. It was OK, but I was expecting more stuff about Native American culture. It was mostly pottery and other arts made by Native Americans — and most of it was more modern and not traditionally used items.
After that we went to the Arizona Diamondbacks game at the BOB. It was the first time I was in the stadium, although I viewed it from the outside before. The game was pretty good and the food prices were good. The drink prices, however were a little high. Anyway, I enjoyed the game.
After the game we went to Rustler’s Roost for dinner. It is a cowboy steak house. The food was good and they had a Long Horn out front to look at. In the past we went to Pinnacle Peak which has a similar theme, Both are very good and I’d recommend either of them. After dinner we went back to the hotel and watched some TV and then went to bed early so we could catch the flight home.
The flight home was pretty uneventful, this time with a stop in Houston, but I had a flat tire when we got back to the car. I had a little electric air pump and it filled up the tire and held for the ride home, and the ride to Newark Airport the next day for a flight to Chicago for a work-related conference.