Red Rock Country

Owen, Grandma Kozlik and I made Owen's first trip up to Sedona this past week. The reason for the trip was three-fold: to use up vacation time (I can only carry over 20 hours into the new year), to get Owen out of town for a mini adventure, and to play around with the camera outdoors. Originally Keith was going to go instead of Grandma, but Keith had something pop up at work. We couldn't change the date because we reserved a night at my parent's time share.

I will never tire of Sedona. Even though I've been there over a dozen times, the scenery still amazes me. Which made it easy for me to have fun playing with the camera. I took ~120 pictures, although many of them were of the same scene, I just changed the settings to see what effect it would have. We started off at Bell Rock. We tried to find the trail that went around Bell Rock (and not around Courthouse since we didn't have time), but apparently it doesn't exist. We took BR "Pathway" to BR "Trail", then went back the way we came.

Then we headed to Red Rock State Park, which now costs $8 to go to. I'm not sure we got our money's worth due to the time we spent there and our lack of desire to do much hiking, but the view of Cathedral Rock is pretty spectacular. I was surprised at how good the fall colors were - we saw some very bright gold trees. Based on our hike a couple of weeks ago at Seven Springs I would have thought all the leaves would be off the trees.

Even though we didn't have the correct connector piece for it, I brought our tripod anyway, so I wanted to catch some good sunset and twilight pictures. Our plan was to go up to the Airport lookout, which has some beautiful views. Unfortunately we missed the actual sunset, but I was able to play around with some twilight pictures using the tripod (I just sat the camera on the tripod and used the timer function). Didn't catch anything spectacular, but it was neat to see how things turned out in that light. We now have the right connector piece, so I'm looking forward to playing around with it more.

As I mentioned earlier, we stayed at my parent's time share, which is just outside of Sedona. After unloading everything (it's amazing how much stuff we had for one night!), we had a quick McDonald's dinner (my first time having McD's probably since college), and put Owen to bed. I took a nice soak in the jacuzzi tub, watched the end of The Christmas Story, and went happily to bed.

The next morning we went up to the Catholic church, which is up on a hill with some great views. It has to be the most beautiful church I've been to, at least in the States. The plan was then to do some shopping at the Sedona Outlet mall, but Owen fell asleep right before we got there, so we decided to keep driving and go to the Anthem Outlets.

Then it was back home to check out the pics!