9-15-08

We enter day 6 of the 'epic' road trip of Xomba founder Nick Veneris and his girlfriend as they travel from Jacksonville, Florida to San Francisco, California.

The last two days have been excellent. First, I'll start with Sunday where we spent the day at the South Ridge of the Grand Canyon.

The park was pretty full mostly tourists from France and England. Here are some pictures below then I'll share my thoughts.

That last picture is the river below. Yes, it looks small, but trust me looks can be deceiving. We just walked around the rim of the canyon. Hiking to the river is about 6 hours down. So, if you go down then you stay down for a few days. There you can ride the rapids and such. We didn't have time for that unfortunately, maybe another vacation.

The Grand Canyon looks just like it does in the movies. Not surprising, but breathtaking. If you do anything in the southwest goto the Grand Canyon, but be prepared for crowds. We are off season so I can only imagine how packed it is during the summer.

After spending the day at the canyon we headed out to Sedona about 2 hours away. Sedona, Az looks like the planet Mars. It is completely red. Red dirt, red rocks and red buildings. We got to spend 2 days here and we are leaving in the morning for San Diego, but that's tomorrow's story.

Sedona is a wonderful artist community. Reminds me of St. Augustine, Florida. Tons of trails here. You could spend a month here hiking alone. We went on two hikes today. The first one was called the Bed Rock Trail. About a 3 mile one-way hike by a beautiful rock sculpture. We apent about an hour and a half and did most of the trail before we were dead tired. This is the desert so it was getting hot, I'm talking 107 in the sun. Luckily, it was dry so you don't sweat as bad. We took a solid 3 hour lunch break after this one. Honestly, we pushed ourselves a little too hard. Pictures below.

Around 3pm we hiked the West Fork Trail in Oak Creek. A 11 mile one-way trail that is in the opposite side of Sedona. It is a creek that runs from the mountains through a valley like canyon. This is a wooded trail around 5,000 feet elevation and much much cooler (temp wise). We hiked about 2:30 hours or so round trip, obviously not doing 11 miles.

Once the sun got behind the mountain the temp went from cool to chilly, but this wasn't sunset just that the sun is what makes things hot here. We had to cross about 8 streams and there was a good size group of people all hiking, but once we got about an hour in there were only a couple of us.

The trail was amazing and reminded me of an Indiana Jones movie. Pictures below.

As the sun set here in Sedona I snapped one final picture from a cafe that we were devouring to much Ice Cream at. I'll leave you with that image and the hope that we'll make it back here one day.