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Vacation 2007
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Day 1 - Red Rock WelcomeThis was the day we arrived at Phoenix, AZ, and was promptly whisked away to Sedona, AZ, with a short stop along the way at the Montezuma's Castle National Park, then on to the Amara Resort and Spa, and ending with our meet and greet dinner. |
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Day 2 - Hit The TrailJeep tour through Sedona's desert landscape. Had lunch at the Sedona Heritage Museum. Spent the rest of the day relaxing in the pool and hot tub, and exploring the river near the hotel. |
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Day 3 - The Mighty CanyonHike through the Red Rock National Park, ate lunch at Tlaquepague, and then travel by Bus up to the Grand Canyon and get our first sunset peak at the big ditch. Welcome to the Grand Canyon dinner, and watched the IMax film on the Grand Canyon. |
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Day 4 - Grand DiscoveryGuided tour of the big ditch, followed by spending the day touring around and hiking in the Grand Canyon, including sunset at the canyon. |
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Day 5 - Western MonumentsBus up to the Monument Valley where we went on a Navajo guided tour through the valley. Continue our bus ride up towards Moab, have dinner at the Red Cliffs Lodge. |
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Day 6 - Nature's FaultGuided hike through Arches National Park. |
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Day 7 - Gather `Round the CampfireRiver rafting, horseback riding and farewell campfire dinner. |
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Day 8 - Happy TrailsHave to return to reality. Sad... sad... day. |
Our second Adventure By Disney tour, this one called Southwest Splendors, and Disney continues to live up to our expectations. Once again we took FAR too many photos, this time our total was 3,209, almost 4 GB of images. This website contains 428 of them, 162 taken by me, 258 taken by Amber, and 8 by our adventure guides. We once again had 2 great guides, Tiffany and Chris, but this time we also had a bus driver, Dan, who stayed with us during the entire trip, and effectively became a 3rd guide. He didn't come on everything with us like Tiffany & Chris did, but he was there quite commonly and helped us out and gave us information as often as he was able, and for that he deserves kudos.
This "adventure" was even more of an adventure than the last one. We did a lot of hiking, something we NEVER do. We faced some of our phobias, like our acrophobia (fear of heights) and arachnophobia (fear of spiders). And while I won't say we conquered our phobias, we certainly did things that I didn't think we could or would do. Like amber holding a tarantula, or both of us hiking down a narrow trail at the Grand Canyon.
Once again we were lucky and were in a small tour group. This group was 17, more than our last one, but still small enough to get to know people. This time instead of giving us a daily schedule at the end of each day we were given a booklet with every day's schedule on it on the first day. I think I prefer getting the schedule each day so I don't bother thinking about things in advance, but both methods do seem to work. And once again we were given pins for each day of the adventure, which you can see the artwork for above. They also gave us postcard photos during our trip so we could send them home to friends and family, and once again we decided to keep them all to ourselves (they were scanned and included on Day 8's list.) :) Tiffany and Chris also got gifts for everyone who was celebrating birthdays and/or anniversaries (like us) during the trip, which I thought was a terrific surprise. They gave us a really nice Grand Canyon picture frame with one of the photos of us from the canyon in it.
I also decided to do a little "playing" with photography this trip. I took 3 panorama shots (well 4 actually, but only 3 came out.) And 2 time lapse photography sequences. But you'll see those when you start going through the pictures. This time I also separated out Amber and my photos, and we each added our own photo comments and journal entries.
Now the only thing left to decide is which adventure to take next? How does Ireland sound?