Thursday, July 20

Goodbye Sedona. Sorry to leave the Bell Rock Inn. That place was really nice.

Went to Walnut Canyon National Park. This is a canyon that has old cliff dwellings. They are really interesting. The cliffs in the canyon have been undercut by water as the canyon was being formed. The Indians built homes in these semi-caves using flat rocks and mud. The structures were pretty interesting, and there were lots of them. There were hundreds of different buildings, housing hundreds of people. Everywhere you look in the canyon there were ruins.

The only thing wrong with this place was that you had to go down hundreds of stairs to go into the ruins and see them properly. Going down was one thing, climbing back up was something else again. Imagine an 18 storey building – yup that was how high we had to climb! To make it even more of a challenge is the fact that this place is at 7000 feet and the temperature was around 90. Needless to say, it was a workout! Worth it though.

Looked for another ghost town….nuttin.

Went to the Deer Farm, which is a big zoo sort of thing with deer, reindeer, goats, llamas, pigs, buffalo and probably a few other things. Hundreds of deer and you can just wander around among them. There is food you can buy to feed them so you are constantly surrounded by pushy deer. Kind of fun, but sad to see so many animals in such a small, unstimulating space. Not really a positive feeling about it all. At least there were llamas for Kelsey!

Arrived at Williams and checked into our hotel room – a rail car. Cute, but a few problems: free internet connection won’t work, ants in the room, small warm water tank, not hot, TV with no volume control, remote control didn’t work, gross swimming pool, a broken futon bed for the kids that acted like a hot dog bun with them as the weiner!. Not our best place so far, and expensive to boot!

Williams is a really cute old town. It is one of those on Route 66 that was bypassed by the interstate system. It is trying to recreate itself as a tourist attraction. It is the southern terminal of a train that goes to the Grand Canyon, and is really playing up the Wild West thing. We had steak dinner at Rod’s Steak House. Really good. A Civil War band came in and played a couple of old songs.

After dinner we went out and watched a gunfight skit in a western town set. Pretty well done. We drove around the town, (took all of 5 minutes) and saw the police had blocked off Main Street so there could be another gunfight. Hmm, something wrong with that picture!

Off along route 66 to Oatman and Laughlin tomorrow.