Arizona Dream

After Utah, we go South and enter Arizona, the Grand Canyon State. The temperature is rising and it’s a big red desert. We go through the town of Kanab, famous for the many Hollywood movies shot here like Stagecoach, Planet of Apes and TV series like the Lone Ranger. You can see around town the various props used during the shoots.

Pretty houses in Kanab. Did a movie star stay here?

The Wild West!

After a long stretch of very straight roads, we reach the Grand Canyon and cross the Colorado River. Actually the Grand Canyon area is just so big that you can really only see a small part of it at any given time. We battle our way through the tourists and all the commercial craziness and reach the viewpoints. It’s obviously completely amazing. I have rarely seen something so beautiful and gigantic.

We also decide to a small hike down the canyon but only for a couple of hours so we reach probably only a quarter of what it would take to go all the way down.

Nothing like a sunset on the Grand Canyon.

Afterwards, we drive down to Flagstaff and sleep there. The next day we explore this very pretty little town.

We continue our journey towards Sedona and spend a few hours in a park called Slide Rock State Park which takes its name from the natural water slides on the river, a very popular attraction for the local community. We spend a few hours there and using those slides is a lot of fun!

Sedona is surrounded by these huge giant red rocks.

We struggle a bit to find a place to sleep but we end up in a little park called the Dead Horse Ranch Park near Cottonwood. We get up pretty early as this is really in the middle of a desert. The name comes from a family of settlers from Minesota who were looking for a ranch, they found one there with a dead horse next it.

Is this the Dead Horse Ranch?

Only a few minutes away from our campsite, we reach Jerome which has an interesting history. It was a boom town which reached up to 10,000 inhabitants which were there mainly for the mining industry. The story of the town is filled with stories and it was almost abandonned become of a ghost town. But then a few locals decided to keep the town alive. It is now a little tourist destination with about 350 inhabitants, lots of hotels and boutiques.