Last Day of Vacation

I intended to get up early to catch the sunrise over the canyon, but I decided that I got my fill of sun pictures last night so we slept in and allowed ourselves to be a little lazy. We made our way back to Grand Canyon around 9 o’clock. We picked a trail that went down into the canyon. As a matter of fact this trail went all the way down to the river, but we didn’t get anywhere close to that. The bad part of hiking at the canyon is you have to hike straight down to start and then straight back up to end. It’s sort of backwards to what we are used to. But it was still fun to hike down inside the canyon for a little way. I hate to admit this, but I got a little bored with the same scenery.





Yes, the Grand Canyon is truly amazing, but there is only so much time I can spend looking down into it. We decided to leave a little earlier than originally planned and head back to the valley. The drive back was terrific. We went back a different route than we drove up and it was such a scenic drive. Not exactly what you picture when you think of Arizona . . . That's a snow-capped mountain at the end of this road.


We were both wishing we were back on the motorcycle. We got back into the Phoenix area in the afternoon and had some time to splash around in the pool and lounge in the shade. I know what you're thinking, "There's no way Paula was in the pool." But wait, I have proof:

We started to ease our way back into our home life by talking about work (uuuugh) and eating beef jerky and popcorn for lunch. We thought it would be too much of a shock to our system to go directly from paradise and gourmet meals to the reality at home.

We headed into Downtown Tempe for dinner and just as we parked the car at PF Changs Joan called and invited us to their house for dinner. Since we didn’t have a proper goodbye, with her being carted off to the hospital, we took them up on their offer and headed to their gorgeous home in Phoenix for a casual dinner. Quite the pleasant evening.

Seems like we often go on a great vacation that leaves me thinking, “How are we ever going to top this one?” and this trip was certainly one of those. We are very much looking forward to our return to the awesome state of Arizona, and I'm pretty sure we just picked our retirement spot.