Day 2: Phoenix to Sedona. 118 miles; 2 hours, 12 minutes (including a stop for gas).
Day 3: Sedona. Not a lot of miles but 16,851 steps.
Sometime after 8 pm last night I tried to draft a blog post about our second day on the road. Exhausted and cranky, I churned out a couple of tedious paragraphs, but when I showed them to Steve, he enjoined me, “Don’t publish that.” Too tired to argue, I yielded to his judgment.
I awoke at 5:20 this morning and had a flash of insight. If we got up then and made it out the door quickly, we would have a shot at getting a parking spot at the trailhead for the Boynton Canyon Trail, which a close friend had recommended most strongly for a hike. Steve went along, and we whizzed from our lodge through central Sedona on streets that had been choked with traffic upon our arrival Wednesday.
But everything went splendidly this morning. We arrived at the trailhead at 7:06 am and got the last parking space. (Yesterday we’d learned that because of the Easter and spring break combo, this is the busiest week of the year, and the cause of the agonizing traffic jams that contributed substantially to my crankiness yesterday.) Getting out the car, I found the extra room key I thought I’d lost. (Bracing myself for a hefty key-replacement fee also had upset me.) The morning was chilly, but the skies were crystal clear and sunny, and the landscape (which neither Steve nor I had seen before) explained why so many of our friends are wild about Sedona.
Sedona’s soaring red rock, so architecturally monumental, lies at the heart of their devotion. But guidebooks and other hypesters also talk about this area harboring mysterious vortexes, “swirling centers of energy that are conducive to healing, meditation and self-exploration….places where the earth seems especially alive with energy.” Boynton Canyon is supposedly a vortex hotbed, one of the reasons I’d wanted to hike there. The visitsedona.com website had promised, “It is virtually guaranteed that you will leave feeling better than when you arrived.”
I wouldn’t have bet money that would prove true. But it did.
At home and abroad 