Soooo, what a weekend!
I flew out of work at 3pm on Friday and headed for the airport, the flight into Phoenix was right on time, excellent flight, no problems or anything! Got my rental car and headed out for Sedona. After driving through lots of random construction and lots of winding back roads I found the camp ground around 9:30ish. Laid out my sleeping bag and went to bed. Got up early the next morning and headed out to Slide Rock where they were having this crazy Apple Festival. It was alright. Not exactly what I was expecting and the trails there were only about half a mile long. So I made my own off roading trails and did some bouldering up to the top of the rocks which was lots of fun! Getting down was not so much fun! lol. Hung out at the festival for a little bit and then headed off to Red Rock Canyon.
Red Rock canyon was really very neat, though again there were only about 5 miles of trails. I did the longest trail which was about 3 miles and had enough of that so I headed back into town to explore the touristness of Sedona, AZ. I have to say that I was not impressed by the town of Sedona, there’s way to much touristy shit. And the Pink Jeep and competitors are EVERYWHERE! I stopped into the tourist information booth and asked the guy where a good place to watch the sunset was at. He told me to just drive up to the Airport and watch it from there. I told him that I didn’t want to just drive somewhere and that I wanted to hike somewhere. He said “I wouldn’t suggest that, It’s too dangerous.” You know that once you say that I just have to do that, so I pressed him for some good hiking because the shit I had been told about sucked. He finally coughed up this great hike to Cathedral Rock but he said, “It’s way to dangerous to do today.” BAH! I headed out after that and did another short hike where I got rained on. I love mountain weather!
From there I headed off to the Cathedral Rock hike. It’s only a half mile, but it’s a VERY steep half mile hike and WELL worth every effort. I basically ran up the whole thing bouldering and stuff up the side of this mountain. Got up to the top and it was just AMAZING! So beautiful, I wish that they hadn’t ruined such a wonderful place with so many stupid fat American tourists. Watched the sunset and ate a PB&J and then headed down. Going down was just as much fun as going up, and this time I folloed the trail, so not as much rock hopping was needed.
Headed back into town and found this place that was EXACTLY like Panera Bread, but it was called “WildFlower Bread Company”. Got a salad and sat and used the internet for a while then headed back to the camp site and crashed for the night. I had a different camp site this time with a CLEAR view of the sky. Absolutely amazing! You could see all the stars and the milky way and everything. Breathtaking! I laid there for a bit watching the stars and then fell asleep. Around 11ish or so the moon came out from behind the mountians and woke me up because it was so bright! I got a little chilly that night, but after zipping up the wonderful new 0 degree sleeping bag I was nice and toasty! 🙂
Woke up Sunday morning early and headed out for the grand canyon. I got up to Flagstaff and all the tourist information things were closed. So I called some LA people to try and figure out what was going on. I found this great place called “Sunset Crater and Wupatki”. It was a really great drive through the country side and you got to see this really neat lava flow and old volcano, etc. After that you drive about 20 miles and you get to see these really neat old Adobe houses from the Wupatki Indians. Very very neato! After those I headed into the Grand Canyon, checked out my camp site and then did some Rim hiking and took a trail down into the canyon for about a mile.
I headed back up to watch the sunset which the paper said was at 6:30. I find a great location to watch it about 5:30 and decided to just sit and wait instead of running off to find somewhere else. Last time I was the canyon for a Rim sunset there were 8 million tourists who ruined the great spot I had found before.
So I sit there and 6:30 comes around and the sun was still WAY up in the sky, I was getting very confused by this point. Lots of other people started gathering and finally at 7:30 the sunsets! Apparently I had no idea all weekend what time it really was, oh well. Also there was this REALLY cute Australian boy doing a filming about the sunset and one of the great wonders of the world. Some stupid asian walked right infront of his Camera as he was taking video of the sunset and he yelled at him, it was so funny! There was also this asian sitting next to me, wearing a beanie, hoodie, and a big furry coat! It wasnt that cold! I was there in a t-shirt and shorts! Crazies.
I hiked back to the camp site making a stop off at the General store and bought a Grand Canyon patch. Crawled into my sleeing bag and had another amazing open sky view! I just can’t describe it!
Woke up the next morning and had 2 voicemails and an email from work… I called them back and found out that the email server had crashed. I also had this voicemail/email from one of the really annoying guys at work. “My email doesn’t work.”… I assumed that fixing the first problem would fix his problem. But I called him bak just to be sure. He didn’t answer and I left a VM. I started heading back to Phoenix after that because I could just tell this was going to be a disaster. He called me back while I was pooping so I didn’t answer. then called him RIGHT back and he didn’t answer AGAIN so I left a VM. A couple minutes later I get an email from the boss man saying that this needs to be fixed ASAP, blah blah blah. Ugh. So I call the guy back again and he answers.. His problem.. The signature at the bottom of his emails are not showing up! WTF!?!?!? Are you fucking kidding me!? So I have him transfer me to the boss man and I yell at him about that. UGH. Fucking annoying.
Got back to Phoenix and came to the hotel. Have been hanging out with Mark and all the other gay nerds. So many iPhones! And who knew there were so many gay nerds! And some of them are actually CUTE! lol.
Other Drama regarding Jason/Steve/Const and Mike. Not really going to get into it here, but I feel it’s the last straw between Jason and I. And he wonderes why our friendship has been going downhill. It’s because of shit like this. First Erick/Kris shit now Const/Mike stuff. I can’t deal with it. Whatever happened to loyal friends.
The conference is really cool so far. I’ve learned so much already and had tons of fun last night with the guys. I’ve even met some great guys from Argentina and Peru who can help me out down there with stuff.