Arizona!

I just had a wonderful trip to Arizona with WO to visit his family and see the sights. Wonderful.

Arizona is nice and warm (relatively–the mornings were a bit chilly) and pretty. WO’s family is awesomely fun and funny and sweet and welcomed me with open arms.

Scottsdale (near Phoenix) is a big, fairly flat town. The roads are in pristine condition (courtesy of a lack of freezing weather) and all of the plants are alien to me. Palo verdes and cacti and lots of red dirt and gravel and mountains (hills) in the background. Very, very few front yards had grass–grass like that just isn’t native. Instead, people had gravel and well-placed cacti of several different breeds.

Houses there tend to have either Pueblo- or Mediterranean-inspired architecture, and everything is low-lying. I saw no sky scrapers. Many of the houses were single storied. Everything was colored in sandy sands of brown and red, spiked with the dark green of cacti. The air is dry, and increased in humidity are very noticable.

As I said above, WO’s family is amazing. They put the both of us up for six days, endured our annoyingly couply couple-ness (you know what I’m talking about), and cooked up a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner. WO’s father was cool enough to let us hijack his Sebring convertible when we went out, and bought plane tickets so that WO can come to Nashville for a good bit of Christmas break (after he visits extended family up in New York).

WO and I met up with an old friend of his on Tuesday for a few hours (she was fun, too), ate good quasi-Mexican food that evening, saw the film “Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices” that evening. WO was in and out of the dentists office for a couple of mornings.

We spent part of one afternoon at a very nice used bookstore, where I picked up a logic puzzle book for my younger sibling, as well as a stack of sci-fi books and The Vagina Monologues (which WO’s sister [who’s quite the social activist], WO, and I managed to read in the ensuing days).

Thanksgiving was spent walking–first around WO’s neighborhood (because we both need exercise, alas), then out on a preserve trail so that I could get a view of what a real Arizona desert looks like.

I took pictures, of course. Some are of the amazing cacti in WO’s front yard, but many are of the trail we hiked. There’s even one of the little cactus I bought. I don’t even know what kind of a cactus it is, alas.

There’s also a video! There’s no sound, and it’s not too interesting, but it’s a little panorama of the desert from the hike. I focus in on a big Saguaro cactus. I think there’s also some mesquite visible in the video. There was plenty of that around.

All in all, the trip was amazing and I want to go back.