We went to the Grand Canyon today. We went, we saw, my boys’ capacity for grandeur was exceeded, and eventually we left. I’ll possibly have more to say later, but for tonight I’m tired. We’re gonna take it easy tomorrow.

So today, as planned, we drove down through Oak Creek Canyon to Sedona. We visited Flagstaff about eight years ago, but we didn’t get to Sedona on that trip; so it had been almost twenty-two years since I last saw the Red Rocks. I’d forgotten how impressive they are, and how beautiful the area around Sedona is.

I’d planned on driving around Sedona a fair amount, revisiting the places Jane and I went back then: Airport Mesa, the Chapel of the Cross, Tlaquepaque, and so forth. As it worked out, we parked in the “Uptown” part of the Sedona, and never really got any further into town. We looked at the shops, and had some ice cream, and bought one “Red Dirt” shirt each (T-shirts literally dyed with the local red soil). I don’t know if it’s the shirts or the dying process, but they have a really neat soft feel to them, and they are more-or-less the color of the Red Rocks.

But we spent most of our time in Sedona not actually in Sedona: we took a Pink Jeep tour up Schnebly Hill Road, the old, mostly unpaved road that goes up the side of the canyon and which was the first road between Sedona and Flagstaff. The views along the way are simply stunning.

I asked my boys later whether they’d enjoyed the tour; yes, very much. What did they like? The scenery, or the bumpy ride? The bumpy ride. Well, it was fun.

After the tour, we headed out of town again; there’s a ton of roadwork being done in Sedona at the moment, and the traffic snarls, which we saw from the jeep, were horrendous. We decided to cut our losses, and had a picnic in a picnic area about a third of the way up Oak Creek Canyon instead. Interesting place: there were ants absolutely everywhere, except (for some unknown reason) on the picnic tables, and we spent a considerably length of time just watching them.

I dropped a peanut on the ground, just to see what would happen. The little black ants found it first, and definitely found it an object of interest; but before a real trail of them could be formed, the peanut was discovered by one of the much larger red ants…which commenced to drag it toward its nest. I was floored: the ant was much smaller than the peanut, but while we watched the ant moved it over a foot. Eventually another red ant showed up, and while I think they were from the same nest they didn’t work together all that well.

After dinner, back in Flagstaff, I noticed that there were some significant clear patches in the sky, so we headed to Lowell Observatory to let it get dark, and see if we could see some stars. We live in the L.A. Basin, and the light pollution is such that you can see maybe seven stars in the entire sky, if you’re lucky. My kids have no real idea what the Milky Way looks like.

We got to enjoy the Observatory’s visitor center, but by the time it got dark the cloud cover had increased again and there were no stars to be seen, darn it!

And so, back to the hotel, and so to bed.