As it is now snowing, and has been most of the day, thought I might as well try putting out another blog.  We have now been in Sedona for 6 weeks, so half way through our stay. Boy is time flying by!

Anyway, since my last missive we have settled in and done quite a lot of interesting stuff.  Joined a gym – SedonaFit – which is small, but has some unique Kinesis equipment so all our needs are covered. Membership seems to be predominately our age which is a little depressing, but it does make me look good on the free weights.  Ann found her water aerobics classes, which until day were held in an outdoor pool at Sedona High School.  Heated, but some of the mornings were a little chilly, but she toughed it out.  Today’s class was at an indoor facility at a resort just down the road, which was good as it was 38’F/3’C and snowing went she headed for class this morning!  Really helps her knees, which we have just found out have no cartilage, and will require knee replacement surgery in 2-5 years.  However, there are remedial procedures which can be done and we’ll explore that option once we are in Portland.  I have identified 3 golf courses – all in The Village of Oak Creek – 30 mins drive through the mountains on Rt 179, but the drive is quite spectacular winding its way through huge red mesas.  I’ve been playing about once a week, but rain and snow has been cutting into playing time recently.

We have covered most of the local wineries and tasting rooms and have been impressed with the standard of the wines.  So far we have not come across any wines that we didn’t think acceptable – I know we’ll drink anything, total winos, etc., etc.  Arizona is way above the average wines we found in the Texas Hill Country, which I must admit is surprising considering they have a much smaller wine industry than Texas and are at about the same stage of development.  Terroir is very similar, though the weather is probably a little better than the Hill Country, and the focus is on Old Country varietals just like Texas.  We have yet to visit a co-op of about 6 wine makers in Clarksville, plus 2 wineries and that’s it.  There are a lot more wineries down south in the Coronado Valley and Sanoita, where the bulk of the grapes are grown, but we won’t be doing those this trip.

Visited Jerome, an old mining town in the hills of the Verde Valley where gold and copper was mined in the 1800 and 1900s, but had become a virtual a ghost town until quite recently.  Now it has 4 tasting rooms and about 6 restaurants, plus of course all the tourist crap that comes with “development”.  It’s built on a steep hill side and the road through town is a series of S bends.  Tasted some good wine and had a very pleasant lunch overlooking the Verde Valley – fun trip.

Drove up to Flagstaff to buy hiking boots, day pack, etc. so we could start doing some of the Sedona trails that are literally just round the corner from where we are staying.  Flagstaff is 23 miles from Sedona but is an hour’s drive! Some serious hairpin bends on the route and you climb about 2000ft in those 20 odd miles!  Very scenic.  Spent a fortune in REI buying all sorts of cool outdoor stuff.  Visited the Museum of Northern Arizona which has a good collection of early Pueblo Indian artefacts and traces their history through to today’s Hopi and Apache Indians.  Fascinating stuff.  Found a great lunch spot – a brewery which served food from the butcher’s shop and deli next door.  Enjoyed great draft beer with fabulous charcuterie and sarnies – yes!  Hit the butchers shop and loaded up with meats before heading back to Sedona.

Wishart Robson came to stay on his trip from Vancouver to Clemson for the Clemson v Florida State Game.  I met Wish on my first Nigerian contract in Port Harcourt and we have stayed in touch over the years meeting in various spots around the world like London, Perth, and Charleston.  Great fun – played catch-up, played golf, and ate and drank to excess.  All Wish’s fault of course.  We are going to do a return match and visit Wish and Kathy in Palm Springs at the beginning of December, which will probably involve all the above mentioned stuff!

With our new hiking gear we have been doing a hike each week, and started with the Devil’s Bridge.  Classified as Easy by the Forest Service with great views, so off we went.  The first discovery was the “road” into the trail head could only be handled by high clearance 4x4s – did about 150 yards in the Pathfinder before we came across a rocky section that I couldn’t get through.  So parked the truck and set off on a trail that would loop round into the Devils Bridge path, which was lovely, but got seriously busy on the actual Devil’s Bridge track.  We climbed 500 feet in about ½ a mile and then came to the final section which was literally vertical rock steps going up another 100 odd feet.  Easy – yeh right!!  Once you make it on to the actual Devil’s Bridge it is quite something.  Mind you the brain dead young male balancing on the narrowest portion on one leg so his girlfriend could take photos rather marred the view.  I was waiting for that Darwin Awards moment, but the idiot survived this time.  During our hike we had one girl rescued by the EMS after slipping and tearing the tendons in her ankle, saw another girl go down and gash her leg, and met a young man who had spent 3 months at Stone Henge becoming a Druid!  Interesting hike.

Our next hike was the Court House and Bell Rock loop – a beautiful trek round these two imposing mesas of just under 4 miles.  It’s just amazing how the views change and other smaller rocks come into view as you move along the trail.  Came across 4 lady horse riders who were checking out a good lunch spot for a group of riders they were guiding through next week.  Seems they were part of a ladies only riding club that did regular treks through the red rock country.  Two of them were packing – 9mm Glocks – which I commented on, and their leader said it was stupid not to carry when riding the country they did.  Said it was good to see!  Felt a bit under gunned with my .380 auto.  Stopped and ate our sarnies on the edge of a stream gazing up at Court House Rock, after which we legged it back to the trail head.  Completed the loop in about 2 hours, which we thought was pretty good for two ancients.

Took a trip on the Verde Canyon Railroad – and old mining rail line that runs 20 miles from Clarkdale to Perkinsville and back following  the Verde River though the canyon.  We booked first class as this seemed the way to go, but all I can say is I hate to think what economy was like!  Sitting outside on the “viewing car”, a flatbed with benches, was preferable to sitting inside the cabin, even with the cash bar available. Spectacular views, and you see some really remote parts of the Verde Valley.  Very touristy and railway music is pumped out the whole time – that means every song that was ever written about trains is played!  Only switched off so the guide could point out rock formations of interest like Turtle Rock and Lincoln’s Nose – the man had a vivid imagination!

Drove over to Cottonwood – a small town 15 miles down into the Verde Valley – to do the Old Town Historical Society’s house tour.  Most of them were small 1900s cottages with no real historical features.  Makes you realise that this part of America wasn’t really settled until the 1900s, so apart from the Native American pueblos, and odd Spanish mission, nothing is that old.  The town was hopping as it was their “Saturday on Main.”  Main St was lined with vintage cars, and stalls selling all the normal stuff, complete with a country & western band belting out songs while some people danced in the street.  Anyway, we enjoyed a very pleasant amble through the old town, lunch at a Thai restaurant, a visit to Arizona’s oldest distillery’s tasting room where we found a good aged rum, and then it was back to Sedona. With the sun behind us, it’s always a spectacular trip into Sedona with the sun reflecting off the red mesa rock formations.

This part of northern Arizona is packed with Native American sites dating back thousands of years, and is one part of the country where Clovis Points have been discovered – large stone spear heads from the Paleoindian period 13,500 years ago.  Most of the sites we have visited were built by the Sinagua and Salado Indians about 1200-1500 years ago, though a lot of the sites were in use far earlier.  Most of them are cliff dwellings with a water source from springs or rivers, and arable land close by where they grew corn, squash, and beans. The dwellings housed anywhere from 20 or 30 people up to hundreds, and often in 2 or 3 story structures. These tribes had no written language, so what we know of their life and culture is determined by pottery and artefacts.  The settings of these pueblos are quite beautiful, with some of them in remote canyons that are quite awe inspiring.  So far we have visited five sites – Montezuma’s Castle, Montezuma’s Well, Tuzigoot, Palatki, and Honanki.  Montezuma’s Well is a huge sink hole full of water that never, ever, runs dry.  Not sure of the water source but it has high levels of CO2 so there are no fish, but it supports a type of leech and water scorpion that are not found anywhere else in the world.  There are pueblo structures around the walls of the well that can’t be seen until you climb down to water level – quite fascinating.

As you can tell we are enjoying Sedona and the Verde Valley – a truly beautiful and spectacular part of Arizona – and so different from the Texas Hill Country!  The climate is pretty good as well – dry and sunny with clear blue skies most of the time – plus the air always smells so fresh and clean with hints of pine and juniper.

I know, way behind on my spasmodic blogging, but my Editor in Chief (now fired) managed to delete my 1800 word draft that I did covering our 2 day trip from Fredburg to Sedona!  Super AngryAnglo!!  Anyway, that and a really crappy internet service at the house means I have not been really motivated to turn out my normal scintillating prose.  We are now in our second day of really horrible weather – rain, and sleet with temperatures at 47’F/7’C for the high, and 34’F/3’C at night – which has driven me back to my blog!  This is the second attempt as the internet failed while I was on the blog site and I lost half of what I had written!!!

We ended our stay in Texas with a wine dinner at our favourite restaurant Valeria with Jim and Jerry, and Veronica, J&Js friend from DC, who is a sommelier and wine consultant.  Another convert to Valeria’s food and wine!  Then it was packing up the truck and saying farewell to our new friends, and our wonderful neighbour and my golf partner, T. J. Dooley, a one-time cowboy and one of life’s great characters.

We had a pleasant and uneventful trip staying in Van Horn, TX and Globe, AZ on our way through to Sedona.  Van Horn is a pretty nasty blip on the I-10 corridor in west Texas, about 100 miles east of El Paso.  It’s only saving grace is the El Capitan, a beautifully restored 1930s Spanish-Colonial hotel built to support the cattle and tourist industries.  Apart from being a really nice hotel it has a good bar and restaurant, which is vitally important as there is nowhere to eat and drink in Van Horn apart from petrol stations!!  Mae Mae, the bartender, a school teacher who works the evening shift to keep her mind off her Special Forces son who is somewhere in the Middle East badlands, produced some of the best Margaritas we have ever tasted.  So a few Margaritas, a good dinner with a pleasant bottle of Super Tuscan, and then Mae Mae Irish Coffees for desert meant we had a good night in Van Horn.

The next morning it was get through El Paso time.  I-10 runs straight through the southern half of the city and should be a breeze, but never is!  Road works and accidents means you end up stuck in stationary traffic gazing down on “the wall” and the Mexican side of the city, and this time was no different!  Then it was into New Mexico which is a bad version of west Texas with miles and miles of desert, complete with a huge Border Patrol check point that inspects all vehicles for drugs and illegals.  Yep, every vehicle travelling on I-10 gets checked!  Our stopping point that night was Globe, AZ so we cut across New Mexico on Rt 70 which was lots more desolate countryside until we hit the hills of east Arizona.  We stopped for lunch in Deming, NM at the Adobe Deli which received good reviews on various social media sites.  It is actually 9 miles outside of Deming at the end of a dirt road in the middle of nowhere!  An old railway carriage tacked on to an even older barn, covered in vines and overhanging trees, with large statues of horses, bison, and bears peering out of the foliage. When we initially walked in, we could scarcely see as there were no windows.  Stuffed animals of all sizes adorned the walls and ceilings and the place looked as if it was last cleaned sometime in the 1980s.   The place was bustling and it had a good menu and wine list. We shared an onion soup and split a roast beef dip sandwich – both were large and delicious!  We started chatting to a man at the table next to us and it turns out he was a local farmer whose father had emigrated to the States from Hungary back in the 40s.  Only in America!

Noftsger Hill Inn, Globe AZ

We had decided to meander across country and avoid Phoenix both because it’s more interesting off the interstates and also to avoid the highway shooter on I-10 / I-17 in Phoenix, who was up 7-8 hits at the time!  Globe is an old mining town dating back to the 1870s producing first silver, and then copper.  Our B&B, the Noftsger Hill Inn, was a 1900s school house built by the Old Dominion Mining Company for their workers, perched on a hill overlooking the old mine works. All the classrooms have been converted into bedrooms and as a result, our room was huge. We had a king-sized bed, a twin bed, a sitting area in the middle with couch, couple of chairs, coffee table and TV, plus a wardrobe for our clothing and yet another table and chair for our computer.  We even had a chalkboard in our room! The old coat room was the bathroom. Dinner that night was in the local Italian restaurant and was the worst food we have had on our travels!  A mediocre bottle of Chianti helped get through food that must have come from preprepared frozen stuff!  Looking around we noticed just about everyone was eating pizza – obviously the only edible product of the place.  Our breakfast next morning more than made up for dinner as our hostess produced fruit compote made from pears from her garden, a good frittata with local eggs, and fresh bread with home made jam – excellent!  The other couple at breakfast were Brits from Yorkshire!  He was also named Tony and worked for the Yorkshire Park Services and was on a busman’s holiday touring some of our national parks.

As the last leg of our trip into Sedona was quite short we decided to do more meandering and stopped at the Tonto National Monument to visit the Salado cliff dwellings.  On the advice of the site ranger we bought an old farts pass that was valid for life and gave us access to all of Arizona’s National Parks and monuments, all for the grand sum of $10!  The National Parks Service is really awesome and does a superb job managing and presenting their sites.

We stopped for lunch in Cottonwood, a town near Sedona, because we found a Persian restaurant there.  We shared appetizers of baba ghonoush, garlic potatoes, and hummus and it was the best we’ve had in ages! Turns out the restaurant is owned by an Iranian couple who emigrated to the States and ended up in the food and beverage industry because the husband, who had two degrees in computer engineering, liked to cook and was a good cook!  Had quite a wine and beer list with beers from Turkey, Armenia, Belgium, and Russia.  We tried the one of Turkish beers and a Russian Classic, both really good.

Suitably fortified we barrelled along Rt 89A into Sedona, which is quite spectacular as you drive through these huge red mesas silhouetted against a brilliant blue sky dotted with white clouds.  Completely picture postcard stuff.  By late afternoon we were unpacked, done grocery shopping, and was basically settled in our West Sedona town house.  So starts the second stage of our travels across America.