Nature

Sedona, the last leg of our trip. The weather got nicer in Colorado on the day we had to hit the road, and it was a looooong drive. Explored a little bit more of the landscape in Colorado, and in to Utah, we decided to hit the four corners and do the hokey we’re in all four states thing in the navajo land. Drove a little bit in to monument valley and realized, we are just going to be driving forever! So we headed back on our road to Sedona. It took forever to find a bathroom too!

We heard on the news that National Parks are opening on Saturday, which was awesome, originally our plan was to stop in the Grand Canyon during our ride down, but it wasn’t Saturday yet… However, once we hit Sedona, we didn’t want to leave. Just wanted our foot on the ground, explore, and take in the scenery. It was gorgeous, the red rocks, everywhere you turned you saw these spectacular formations. And we hiked, a lot. We would get up, grab a little breakfast, go out for a few hours, come back in to town, have lunch, then do more hikes. We were doing the whole road trip thing and were glad to be moving around. But, I think mother nature was trying to tell us to just calm down and take it easy… After a couple days of hiking, we ran in to a rattlesnake, but it rattled to let us know that it was there, and we listened… Then later in our afternoon hike, we kind of pushed it too close to dusk. Once that sun starts going down it gets dark and kind of chilly. Well, it turns out the creatures also like to come out at that time, as we were walking further in to our hike, the few people we saw were walking the opposite direction for a reason. Eventually, we decided to turn around, and happened to come upon these scary looking things called Javelinas in our path. We climbed up a tree and saw that there were 7  or 8 of them, and thought, crap, we are stuck here all night. I tried to google what to do but had no service out there, it’s sad that in nature, my first instinct is “quick, google it!”

After a while up that tree, we got brave and decided to just make a lot of noise. Here we are, in this tree trying to make ourselves sound like big scary monsters to these Javelinas and it worked! They started to scatter, and once we thought the coast was clear. We ran, full speed, out of there. So happy to finally be in the car, that we decided we were just going to visit a vineyard the next day and relax.

I loved Sedona, it had some funky new age people, but the nature is everywhere.

The drive to Colorado from New Mexico was beautiful. We are headed to Durango,  had a pit stop in Pagosa Springs and roomed in the Mancos Valley. Originally, we wanted to come up here to explore Mesa Verda, but with the government shutdown, national parks are closed.

Hoped to be able to go on some fantastic hikes, but we got completely rained and snowed on. It was still gorgeous, the mountains in the background are unbelievable. We visited this great little honey place called Honeyville and tried all sorts of interesting whipped honey. We wanted to see the Honey Bees, eventually we are starting up our own colony as beekeepers. I wanted to see the old mining town of Silverton, so we drove up this high switchback and ended up in a total white-out of snow as the elevation increased. Kind of dangerous, but we turned around, the little SUV we rented came out really handy for this.

It was great, and our gracious AirBnB host was awesome. We got to talk with her and get to know a little bit more about the town we stayed in. Wished the weather was nicer and the parks were open, but it was still pretty out there and we enjoyed ourselves. Loved the little local health food store Zuma!