Monday, January 09, 2006

Our travel day began at about 9am when we hopped on the hotel shuttle to Dulles (that’s pronounced Dul-less, Weaver family) airport. Easy check-in, a little wait through security, our flight left on time, it’s all good.

Land in Atlanta and make our connecting flight to Las Vegas, which takes off on time and we land in Sin City at about 4:40pm local time, which is in the Pacific time zone so we feel like it’s about 7:40pm.

Walking through the airport to baggage claim, I see the slot machines and decide to go ahead and play the dollar that Scot asked me to play for him. It’s a loser. I play a dollar of my own and also lose.

We get our bag and go to get our rental car, which took longer than it should have because the agent started confusing us with how we’ll be charged by the hour after we exceed the time we checked the car out and did we want to change our contract. Beau had booked at a weekly rate which seemed firm, so we stuck with the original contract.

We got our car and hit the road for Sedona, about 4.5 hours drive away. It wasn’t a bad drive, just long and dark. As a passenger it was really hard for me to keep my eyes open after a while, especially since there was absolutely nothing to look at. No street lights, no cities, just empty and dark roads. The one cool thing was crossing the Hoover Dam at night and it was also a little scary since it’s very high up and there isn’t much space or barrier to the edge.

We got into Sedona at about 12:30am local time, which is in the Mountain time zone, so we felt like it was 2:30am. We checked into the resort, got to our condo unit, which was very nice with a fireplace and jacuzzi tub, and crashed. We noted that Sedona has no street lights and so it was very dark driving through town. What we didn’t realize was that we had missed out on some spectacular scenery - the next morning when we went out the door to the car, we gasped at the amazing view we had of the red rocks. Our resort was smack in the middle of the bowl of those red rocks that surround Sedona. Gorgeous!

It was long travel day, but we managed to adjust our body clocks very well. Monday was supposed to be a lounge and rest day but we ended up hitting the road to explore the area.

Next up: HD2 - Oak Creek Canyon, Meteor Crater, and Sunset Crater Volcano