Thanks for the Delays, Walmart.

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Well, as you may recall my vacation got off to a rough start with all kinds of confusion around tours and the rental car. Well that little dark cloud was just waiting for me to get back from vacation  to start in again.

I stayed over at my sister’s because the plane came in so late so Sunday morning we backed my car out of her garage to let her park her car and oops! My car had a flat tire. Yup, flat as a pancake!

My nephew is very handy. It was so nice to have someone around that is calm and controlled and knew what he was doing. He came over with his patch kit but wasn’t able to rescue the tire. We tossed the deceased in the back of their mini van and George’s wife Kelly drove me up to Walmart. That was the only place in the vicinity that was open on Sunday for tires.

Judging by their attitude they knew they were the only game in town. They weren’t rude exactly but they certainly didn’t give you the feeling that they wanted to help. We even explained that I was from out-of-town and looking at a 3 hour plus drive to get home. They didn’t care. They said it would be at least an hour maybe longer before they would get to my tire.  All I wanted was the old tire off and the new one on the rim …a 10 minute job at most.

They were not to be swayed so we asked them if they could call us when it was done. They took down Kelly’s cell phone and back to my sister’s we went. And there we sat. Granted it was a nice time to catch up with everyone. My other nephew, John, George’s brother was there so it was like a “mini” family reunion. The time went pretty quickly with all the visiting and catching up but I suddenly realized that it had been over 2 hours and we still hadn’t gotten a call so we called them.

Walmart :”Oh yeah ( Very nonchalant). You tire’s right here.”

Us: “Is it ready?”

Walmart: “Sure”

Us: ” We’ll be right down”

 We got there and the tire was “right there”. It was leaning next to the desk. I paid the bill and the employee said “Thanks” and turned away. I said “You mean you aren’t going to put it in the car for me?”

He gave me a look and a heavy sigh ands said he “supposed he could”.

I asked him why they didn’t call as agreed. His answer was that they paged us in the store. I responded that we weren’t in the store and that they were made aware of that when we dropped the tire off. He just shrugged and said there was a shift change so how would they know?

OMG!? Is this customer service? I fumed all the way back to my sister’s. There George put the new tire on the car and I was finally on my way. Any thoughts I had of making stops on my way home like the Saratoga Battlefield had to be canceled. Thanks Walmart.

 First thing Monday, I called the manager of that store and let him have it. His response? “Oh I haven’t had any complaints recently.” Oh Boy..no complaints recently. Does that mean you had complaints before?

Good luck Walmart customers in the Queensbury Store! They are not customer friendly there! My sister said she won’t set foot in that store and I can see why!

But at least I am finally back in Massachusetts and home. I’m ready to start some local exploring until my “next great adventure.”

Sedona Vacation 2011, That’s a wrap!

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As is my habit, I am including a summary of my vacation. I like to fill in any gaps I missed or answer any questions that came up during the series of posts and just give you  my final take on the vacation as a whole.

This was my 2nd trip to Sedona and Northern Arizona. The first trip I traveled alone. This trip with a companion, my sister. The first trip was really unbelievable because I had the freedom to do what I wanted , when I wanted and didn’t need to think about anyone else. This trip required that I be a bit more considerate but seeing my sister’s reactions and sharing her observations as a “first time” visitor made it totally worth it.

That’s the thing about vacations. I love going alone but when I do I wish someone was with me so we could oooh and aaahhh over the sights together but when you travel with someone you have to balance the things you want to do so that everyone stays happy and satisfied. After all, vacations don’t come cheap these days. Luckily my sister and I usually get along pretty good as far as agreeing on what to see and do.

So I will rate this vacation as an A for me. I didn’t give it an A+ because I’d seen a lot of the stuff before but even seeing it a 2nd time was great.

The Grand Canyon Railroad is always a fun ride and now I know the best seat is the Observation dome car.

The Petrified Forest is interesting but doesn’t take long unless you’re a real “rock hound”. The Teepee formations and the painted Desert were more interesting to me.

 The wildlife wasn’t much better this time than last time. We saw a mule deer this trip. Sandy saw 2, one as we were driving down 89 A  and one from the train. I saw a mule deer family last trip in the Grand Canyon National park but not outside the park.

We saw a Roadrunner this trip and I saw one last trip. We didn’t see a live Pronghorn this  trip but I did from the Grand Canyon train last trip. We had to settle for the mounted  head at the Blazin’ M ranch this time.

Speaking of the Blazin’M, the show was just as good, maybe even a little better this time but the food was nowhere near as good as it was in my first visit. But food aside, I would go back to that show in a minute. It’s great fun. Of course leading up to the show was the Verde Canyon railroad and that was special with two great views of bald eagles!

As for new stuff, I think for me anyway, seeing the Pueblo at Tuzigoot and the cliff dwelling at Montezuma’s castle were the high points right after the Grand Canyon of course. The Painted Desert was pretty cool too.

As for the Grand Canyon, I love the breathtaking views from the rim but I can’t help feeling pretty special to be one of the 1% to make it to the bottom of the canyon.

 I also have to say that the tour guide (Joe) from Native American Tours proved to be the most thorough guide I’ve had in Arizona. What he shared in his one tour came up over and over in all the rest of our adventures.

Back to wildlife…we didn’t see any javalinas this trip but we saw a “flycatcher” and I got a picture of that. That little red and brown bird was pretty neat.

 There were the little lizard things too. Just like Florida they are everywhere!

The desert was beautiful too. The cactus was in bloom from all the rain.

That’s not something that happens all the time and the Red Rocks of Sedona are always beautiful. The color is just so rich and vibrant.

It’s “dark sky” too so with the minimal lights at night you have awesome viewing for the stars and the night sky.

Enjoy a little vino and who knows, you too can believe in aliens! 🙂

I’d like to make one more trip basically as a photo-op.  If I can I think I would like to spend a full day at the Grand Canyon and just work on pictures…maybe camp there one night so I can hit sunrise and sunset. I’d also include a trip to Monument Valley and Canyon De Chelley, again for photos. There’s also the slot canyons up near Page, Arizona that are known for awesome and unusual pictures.

So that’s my thoughts. I hope my sister enjoyed the trip as much as I did. I’m looking forward to our next joint adventure. With any luck it will be Alaska in 2012. (have to get there before the glaciers melt or the end of the world arrives in Dec of 2012)

Our last bit of vintage Sedona was the Hot Air Balloon we were able to watch from the balcony of our time share unit on Saturday morning before we left. That just made the trip complete as I saw Hot Air Balloons on my last day on my other trip. 🙂

Last Night, Sedona

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As we left Flagstaff on 89 A we were following a couple of motorcycles and I was contemplating how it would be to take a bike on those hairpin curves coming up. It was at that moment that I saw one of the bikers point to the left. I was confused as I thought it was a hand signal but there was no turn off there. Concentrating on what the motorcycles were doing I almost missed it! Sandy yelled “Deer”. I glanced around but didn’t see it so I reply with a loud..”WHERE!” Of course her reply was “There!”. (Who’s on first?) Anyway I finally spotted a doe bouncing off through the pine forest. It was definitely a mule deer. It ran with its tail down ( a white tail deer has a tail like flag when it runs) and it bounced more than bounded. It made me think of a cartoon animal bouncing with springs on its feet.  Yea! Wildlife!

It’s my last trip down the winding Oak Creek Canyon for this trip. And as if the sunset gods knew it was my last chance the sky lit up in reds and golds over the red rocks of the area. Afraid I wouldn’t get to the bottom in time to get “my sunset picture” I pulled off to a wide spot on the shoulder. I grabbed my camera and bolted outside to see what I could capture.

Unfortunately there was no iconic rock formation for the foreground (like Snoopy Rock or Bell Rock) but I won’t complain. Who knows when I will have another chance like this.

Parked as I was in a precarious place on a winding road, I didn’t dare stay too long or wait out the setting sun. I grabbed what I could and returned to the car to finish the drive down the canyon.

It seems like Sedona was putting the finishing touches on our trip, a nice sunset, a bouncing mule deer. Too bad we didn’t see any javalina’s while we were here.

It was time to think about packing up, clean out the fridge and getting ready to leave in the morning.

Back at the Time Share, we stopped at the reception area to print out our boarding passes and complete the check in process online. I dropped off a couple of boxes of clothes that I was shipping home and then it was time to go back to the unit and finish packing. It was nice to be able to drop off the “if it fits it ships” boxes. The Time Share charged my card for incidentals for the postage and then they gave the boxes to the postman on Saturday. If I had to go to the post office in the morning I wouldn’t have had time before we left for Phoenix.

A nice perk of the time share is an apartment sized washer and dryer. We’d used it mid-week and tossed in a last wash now so that we could take home clean clothes. It’s nice to get home and not be faced with a pile of dirty laundry. On the other hand, if the TSA is going to paw through my suitcases giving them dirty underwear might be a deterent..maybe? I’m still miffed over the loss of that $50.00 camera battery but what can you do???

I will wrap this up now as we did absolutely nothing special that last night so I won’t waste your time with useless drivel. 🙂 I mainly wrote this post to tell you about that final beautiful sunset. As always I have to say that the pictures don’t even come close to doing it justice.

Painted Desert

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The transition from Petrified Forest to Painted Desert was almost seamless. One minute the tour CD was talking about Petrified Logs and fossils and the next the Painted Desert. There was a brief transitional tract when we crossed the railroads tracks that was all about Fred Harvey and the Harvey Girls. I have never seen so many railroads before either. I think it was Joe (Native American Journey’s again) who told us the trains run at 15 minute intervals. The trains are very long, most with flat cars loaded with containers either bound for port on the west coast or coming in to the area with goods. The tracks we passed on the border of the Petrified Forest and Painted Desert are the tracks of the Burlington, Northern and Santa Fe.

Near the railroad tracks we crossed an old Highway. Maybe you’ve heard of it, RT 66. The same RT 66 where we stopped for Ice Cream with Joe the Guide from Native American Journey’s. Wow, that tour and guide seems to have influenced our whole trip! Anyway, Rt 66 is 2200 miles long but Petrified Forest National Park is the only park in the National Park System that contains a segment of this iconic road. A road trip exploring the remnants of this famous highway might be an interesting vacation trip.

By now we were in the Painted Desert. This is the northern end of the Petrified Forest National Park. You can see the massive erosion that has sculpted and created amazing formations of buttes, mesa, hoodoos, and bluffs all in lovely pastels of red, green, purple, blue and other combinations. This type of erosion creates landscapes that are collectively called “Badlands”.

There are a series of well maintained pull offs where you can explore and take pictures. The colors are most intense in the early morning or late afternoon as the mid-day sun tends to make them look washed out. We had the opposite problem since shifting cloud cover was casting dark shadows over much of the landscape.

The pull off points have names like Lacy Point, Whipple Point, Nizhoni Point, Pintado Point, Chinde Point and Kachina Point.

Lacy and Whipple Points are named for individuals that influenced the park. Nizhoni Point is the Apache word for beautiful. Certainly fitting as the park is very beautiful.

Pintadao Point is one of the most famous views in the park. Pintado is Spanish for painted. You can see the highest point in the park , Pilot Rock from this location.

Chinde Point is a Navaho term. It means evil spirit or ghost. It is also famous for a nearly complete fossil found in 1985. “Gerty” was a small meat-eating dino that roamed the area about 200 million years ago.

Kachina Point is the location for the Painted Desert Inn. As it was starting to get late, we simply drove past the Inn but we did stop at the Visitor Center at the Northern End of the park. The rain caught us again so we headed back to RT 40 for the long drive back to Sedona. We arrived in Winslow too late to visit Meteor Crater this trip but if we were able to do everything in one trip we’d have no reason to come back.

We crossed in and out of rain showers and some pretty heavy downpours followed by patches of sun as we headed west toward Sedona.

I don’t think I’ve visited anyplace where I can say that I’ve seen everything I wanted to see.  I have a bucket list for a return trip everywhere I’ve been. Look at the Sedona Area/ Northern Arizona. It’s only the upper part of the state and I’ve made 2 visits but I still have a long list of places to see, things to do and of photographs I want to take and that’s not even taking into consideration everything there is to do south of Phoenix!

I’m pretty sure I’ll be back again, probably not for a couple of years. Other locations and trips are calling me but sooner or later I will return.

Petrified Forest

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Ahh the Petrified Forest, who hasn’t heard of the place where trees have turned to stone? It was quite a ride from the Oak Creek Canyon Overlook. We headed north to RT 40 and east toward Winslow. Along the way we passed Meteor Crater. I’ve been there but to my surprise Sandy said skip it. She said if we had time after the went to the Petrified Forest and Painted Desert we could stop on our way back.

I was surprised how much longer it was after passing Meteor Crater. It was past lunch time so we stopped at a Denny’s for a quick lunch. We had fish! In the middle of a desert we ordered fish! It was really good. Ironic isn’t it?

Back on the road we finally began to see signs for the Petrified Forest. There were lots of places willing to sell us a bit of the petrified wood too. It’s illegal to take any of the petrified trees or bits of wood from the National Park but not all of the Petrified Forest is in the confines of the park so there’s ample opportunity to get a sample. We finally spotted the Visitor Center where I wanted to stop anyway to collect my National Parks Stamp.

We got some good rangers and volunteers again.  We explored the exhibit of  dino remains that were on exhibit and heard stories about the petrified wood and how it’s so hard that only diamonds are used to cut and polish the “gems”.

We bought a CD that is  a ” Driving CD” audio tour. It included a rough map to help us see where we were in relation to what we were seeing.

The whole tour is about an hour a and a half if you drive straight through. We didn’t plan to linger too much but we weren’t going to rush through either. We were playing cat and mouse with the weather again.

 Little rain storms kept cropping up all over. It would rain, kind of hard at times but then it was over and the sun was back out just as fast. We could look out over the landscape and see these little pockets of rain.

The tour started right at the Visitor Center called Rainbow Forest Museum. In addition to the fossils on display here there is a short trail that winds through a section of the Petrified Forest. It contains some of the most massive logs in the forest including the big one named “Old Faithful”.

The road led us into a series of mesas called Flattops.

 It is in this area that archeologists have found evidence of the Paleo Peoples who lived in the area.

They were hunters and gatherers so most of the remains are artifacts such as tools and weapons. They can track the development of trade through the years as their artifacts changed over time.

Jasper Forest has a large deposit of  red hued petrified forest. The logs here were buried in  mud so the minerals from that mud settled in the wood and created the red color. Now the bluff is eroding and the logs are being revealed.

One of my favorite stops was Agate Bridge, a natural bridge of a petrified log. The railroads shored it up with concrete so it stands today.  I am going to share a  story but if you go I am sure a guide will tell it better than I can. The story is that 2 cowboys were playing poker and one bet the other that he and his horse couldn’t ride across the Agate Bridge. If the Cowboy made it he would win a $20.00 gold piece and bragging rights. If he lost, the challenging cowboy would get the dead man’s saddle and boots. Well the horse was surefooted and the cowboy was a good rider and they made it across safely.  Anyway, you won’t catch me on that bridge.

The Blue Mesa was a great spot! The views here were of a striated multicolored landscape. Blue Mesa has also been called the Purple Forest because of the purple or lavender color of the crystals in the petrified wood here. There’s a 1 mile round trip hike that I would love to take if we had more time. The area we are in is also referred to as the badlands, just like the Badlands we visited in South Dakota.

The teepees came up quickly and there was no mistaking them! They are really memorable. They look just like the teepee of the plains indians. There is little plant life or vegetation here . The landscape is so surreal it’s almost like stepping onto another planet.

Our tour led us to Newspaper Rock. It took some looking but I finally spotted at least some of the Petroglyphs this stop is named for. The Petroglyphs are scratched into the surface of the rock. It removed the dark stains on the rocks known as Desert Varnish. Joe (From Native American Journey’s) had mentioned it to us on that tour. Apparently scientists still aren’t in agreement on exactly what the Desert Varnish is but it didn’t stop the ancient people from using it as a black board for their art.

We saw the railroad tracks and the river lined with Cottonwood Trees. Our next stop was at Puerco Pueblo. As we listened to the tour we pulled into the parking area. It sounded like an abandoned pueblo similar to what we saw a Tusigoot. In the interest of time we chose to move on. We wanted to be sure we had time to  see the Painted Desert.