Japanese Friendship Garden - Phoenix

Today we visited the Japanese Friendship Garden in downtown Phoenix. It's quite small, but is also very serene and peaceful. 

Desert Botanical Gardens - Phoenix

Since I have family in town visiting, I get to play tourist in my own city. Today we visited the Desert Botanical Gardens.

Poppies at Bartlett Lake

We drove out to Bartlett Lake today to see the poppies and other desert wildflowers.

Fall in Flagstaff

We drove to Flagstaff to see the fall leaves today. There were also two breweries/taprooms in Flagstaff on our Pubpass that were hadn't used yet. Both were dog friendly, so our dog got to come with us. Our first stop was Grand Canyon Brewing for a drink and lunch. The prickly pear beer was quite tasty.

After lunch, we drove the road to Arizona Snowball, 

and admired the aspens along the drive.

We parked in the lot for the Aspen Nature Loop trail. Parking is much easier on a Tuesday than a weekend!

This is a 1.8 mile, fairly flat, easy to walk trail, which is more of a lollipop than true loop. The only thing that makes it slightly challenging is the high elevation (9271 ft / 2825 m).

You start by walking towards the aspens near the base of the ski lifts, with the San Francisco peaks in view.

Once we reached the loop, we decided to go counter clockwise, and soon saw Sasquatch.

As we continued down the trail, we entered the aspen grove. A lot of these trees had already dropped their leaves.

After exiting that grove, we entered a prairie zone. The big white cloud in the top right section of the picture is smoke from a wild fire southwest of Flagstaff.

This gave us a great view of the valley below.

We then headed to another aspen grove.

Many of the trees here still had their leaves.

From here, it was a short walk back to the stick of the lollipop and back to the parking lot.

On the drive back down to town, we saw three elk (no pictures), then headed to Hops on Birch to use our other PubPass (the tart cherry cider was delicious).

Apache Trail drive to Tortilla Flats AZ

We took advantage of a break in the rain to drive the Apache Trail to Tortilla Flats this afternoon. 

We drove through a few giant puddles,

 saw Canyon Lake 

and even saw a few waterfalls! 

The road was closed after Tortilla Flats due to flooding 

(so was the saloon/restaurant). 

So we had an ice cream 

and turned back towards home.

Summer Roadtrip Day 1: Phoenix to Tucumcari NM

The car's all packed, we are gassing up, and are ready to go.

Getting into the pine trees outside of Payson.

We intended to go directly to Holbrook from Payson but rerouted to Winslow to avoid an accident and construction delays. We saw a brewery advertised in Winslow, so that made the decision easier, since we would be there for lunch 

Unfortunatly, this was only a taphouse and they didn't brew any of their own beers.

Just down the alley from the restaurant, I saw these murals.

Just past Holbrook we stopped at a "trading post" to see the world's largest kachina. It was defunct and missing its face, so we didn't bother with a picture of that. We did get these pictures while in the area:

Around Gallup NM, the car started rattling and shaking, so we pulled over to check the tires. We saw these wild horses in the area by the gas station.

On the way towards Albuquerque, the check tires warning came on, we checked the tires, they looked "ok" and we headed onward. Then it happens about 30 miles later. We added a quick stop at Discount Tire, arriving less than 10 minutes before closing.

Three new tires later, and we were back on the road.

We arrived in Tucumcari around 10 pm, and we were tired, so I didn't take pictures of neon signs in town like I planned to do. Here's a picture of part of our room at the Roadrunner Lodge.