Since we wouldn't be together for Thanksgiving, we put on a full Thanksgiving dinner a couple weeks early. Anne came up from college so we could all be together.
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| From Phoenix, Las Vegas, Grand Canyon |
Arizona is home to lots and lots of desert, and Phoenix is surrounded by vast expanses of desert dotted with saguaros - those cacti that look like they have arms sticking out. Here's a particularly photogenic one
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| From Phoenix, Las Vegas, Grand Canyon |
We also took a drive down to see the St Xavier Mission outside of Tucson. It was built with help from local Native Americans from the Tohono O'Odham tribe, so it's got some unique wood carvings on the inside. They've never finished the second tower on the church, which some speculate may be an excuse to perpetually raise funds for the tower.
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| From Phoenix, Las Vegas, Grand Canyon |
They also had the kind of cactus that attacked Paul as a child (you'll have to ask him for the full story).
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| From Phoenix, Las Vegas, Grand Canyon |
Paul's dad took us on a day trip to see Tombstone and the Chiricahua National Monument. Unfortunately, we forgot to recharge the battery in our camera, so we don't have pictures of this (except one from my phone camera), but both are really fascinating places to see. Tombstone is neat for it's authentic old west feel, a nice change from the sometimes overwhelming big box feel of the city. Here's the one picture I got, at the Tombstone graveyard. You don't see this kind of thing every day!
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| From Phoenix, Las Vegas, Grand Canyon |
Chiricahua, on the other hand, has some extraordinarily impressive "balancing" rock formations that are worth seeing in person. They're the kind of thing that you look up at and think "who put that there and why hasn't it fallen over?"
Most of the time we were in Phoenix, we were continuing our job search, or lounging about drinking lemonade we made from the lemon tree in the back yard. On my next post, I'll tell you about our little 1,000 mile road trip to the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas and the Hoover Dam.
