Heading north on Highway 17 in the direction of Flagstaff after lunch with what seems to be about half of Phoenix. In previous years, the worry was getting stuck in traffic on Friday afternoons trying to get out of town or the crush on late Sunday of everyone returning. Now, it seems that there are so many people trying to escape the summer heat they’ll leave at a moment’s notice and satisfy themselves with spending the day somewhere between Prescott, Cottonwood, Sedona, and Flagstaff.
Our first stop was in Prescott, where Caroline wanted to visit Carma, who owns a shop called Fiber Creek. Pulling into the plaza, I spotted a Starbucks in a grocery, where I also knew I’d be able to make a pit stop for the facilities, have some iced coffee, and get the first part of today’s blog entry written. I’d planned on writing a screed about the traffic, lamenting the cultural and apparent education differences between the customers of the In N Out we had lunch at earlier here in Arizona and the last one we stopped at a few weeks ago in Rowland Heights, California, and whatever else I could throw in as I practiced the, “Get off of my lawn” routine, but instead I’ll just hint at my seething annoyance with public displays of stupidity and leave it at that. Now caught up purging my bladder and spleen, I’ll head over to the yarn store before Caroline purges our bank account.
She bought “stuff,” but I don’t know exactly what yet, and she insists that whatever is in the box belongs to her friend Christine, something about a loom from what I understand. Never trust a fiber artist in the wild is my motto.
Out of Prescott, we were back on the 89A through Jerome as we were just a few weeks ago; no time to stop there today as we are on our way to Sedona, as you already know from the title of today’s blog.
Most everyone is busy looking at red rocks when they are in Sedona; we also remember to look up to catch those spectacular moments when the crepuscular rays (God rays) are beaming down to earth. This was the view from the gas station because, in red rock country, even the sky demands your attention.
This is the view from near where we’ll have dinner tonight. As for dinner, it was pale in comparison to the view, but you win some, and you lose some. After finding some of the best dining spots across America and more than a few in Europe, you have to accept that, at times, even the best of places miss the mark, and this was certainly one of those nights. The name of the place isn’t important as I feel restaurants have enough to deal with due to Yelp and the shenanigans of serious haters.
We arrived at the Mary D. Fisher Theatre, where the Sedona Film Festival is held in late February through early March, with a few minutes to spare before the movies got underway. Before I could get seated, I fell into a conversation with writer, filmmaker, and educator Bruce Anderson of Nature’s View out of South Carolina. Bruce is featured in the movie The Edge: Bruce Anderson – Natural Humanship, which looks at our relationship with ourselves and how we move out of sync with nature due to the burden we’ve incurred by ignoring our environment and our animals’ health and well-being within this toxic ecosystem. Unfortunately, we couldn’t be in Sedona for Friday’s presentations, but lucky me for getting the chance a couple of times this evening to talk with Bruce.
Lucky me that as we approached the moment between two of the films I decided to jump out of the dark theatre to support our local artist; well, I assumed she was a local artist. This is author Carly Kade, and between getting our seats and talking with Bruce I’d see Carly behind her stack of books, but I got caught up with trying to hurry things along so I could catch the films. Good thing, too, as I loved the first film titled, “The Wild Ponies of Chincoteague” by Kurt Kolaja & Tod Mesirow: it’s a tear-jerker. When I got to the lobby, Carly was packing up to leave, but not so packed up she couldn’t grab a couple of copies of her books and sign them for Caroline and me. Turns out that Carly is a Phoenix resident, too, and is working on a third book in the series of her cowboy romance journeys. The first books are “Cowboy Away” and “In The Reins.”
I tried to get back to the movie as quickly as I could, but still, I missed the opening of the next title called, “Talking To The Air: Horses of The Forbidden Kingdom,“ about the region of Mustang, Nepal, and their culture of the horse: a fascinating look into a disappearing way of life.
The last film of the night was “All The Wild Horses,“ about the Mongol Derby 1000 km horse race across Mongolia. This movie was as intense as Chincoteague was emotional, a serious winner of a movie that wrapped us up in its story and immersed us in the landscape as well as any great movie we’ve seen in the last ten years.
I wasn’t properly set up to get a great photo of the Milky Way tonight, but that didn’t stop us from getting out of the car and gawking at the night sky and recognizing that it had been too long since we were out stargazing. It was almost 1:00 in the morning when we got home and we were still elated by such a wonderful day shared between us.
