This was a short day trip that I went on with my friend Audrey who was also my personal trainer. We decided to hit a couple short hikes. The theme of the day seemed to be arches.

Interesting story… While we were buying our day pass at a trailhead parking lot I started talking with this lady from California. I asked her what trail she was doing, she said Fay’s Canyon. Well, that was the same trail that we were doing. She told us that its her favorite trail and that every time she comes for California she hikes it. She’s been there 3-4 times already. She describes this incredible view at the end of the hike.

We part ways and eventually start hiking Fay’s Canyon trail. We don’t see the lady or the car. We hike to the end and we can’t seem to find this “view” that she was talking about. After a looking for ten minutes we decide to give up and head back. On the way back we see the lady walking up the trail. Great, we can ask her how to get to this magnificent view.

We walk up to her and before we can say anything she says, “It this Fay’s Canyon?” LOL

Anyway, we find the arch at Fay’s Canyon and climb to the top of it. Then we head to Devil’s Bridge Arch and climb atop it. The last arch to do was Vultee’s Arch but we never got a chance to do it. Next time…

Instead of going to Galena this year everyone decided that it was finally time to visit Arizona. We rented the Scenic Sedona house on redsedona.com.  The house was great, it was large enough to accommodate all of us and the heated pool and spa was perfect for this time of year. It was colder than usual in Sedona for the last week of February so it took a day to get the pool heated to 74 degrees.

On Friday night, everyone arrived at the Phoenix airport. We had a late start because somebody missed their flight and had to take a later one which arrived at 10:45pm. Our little caravan of cars met up at McDonald’s in Anthem.  From there it was a 1.5 hour drive up to Sedona. We arrived at the house around 1am and everyone got settled in for the night.

On Saturday we got to see just how incredible the view from our house was. It was located on Airport Hill and overlooked the town of Sedona. We had breakfast at the restaurant at the airport.

The best part was that we were able to hike the Airport Loop trail directly from the house.

We hiked the Cathedral Rock trail which was a great challenging trail. It has some nice climbs and decent exposures. The picture on the left shows the “very steep slickrock” portion of the trail.

For dinner we went into town and found a Mexican restaurant that could seat a party of 20! I can’t remember the name of this place. It was in the touristy part of town close by the Harley Davidson store.

On Sunday, most of the girls went to Sedona Rouge Spa. The rest of us ate lunch at the Heartline Cafe and hung out around the house. A bunch of us hiked the Broken Arrow trail in the late afternoon. Dinner was pizza from Pizza Picazzo. It must be good if a bunch of people from Chicago loved it!  On Monday we made the drive back to Phoenix. Had a huge lunch at Ono Hawaiian BBQ (that shit is good!) and hung out at my house until it was time to go to the airport.