I thought I would take a little time to tell you guys about some of the awesome trips I have been on recently on my Get To Know Me Thursdays for the next few weeks. Next week I will be taking a little bit on time to talk about Thanksgiving of course, and the GTKMT (my new little acronym) will most likely be on Friday.
Arizona 2008 was a trip with my parents, I picked it as the vacation spot this year because it is one of my favorite places on earth (California, San Diego area being the other). It was one of the best trips I have ever been on. Please remember these shots are SNAPSHOTS! Don’t judge them photographically please. There is a slideshow at the end with some of my favorite actual photos. And sorry if this post is image heavy, it was hard not to put any MORE pictures in there. Also you can view the slideshow or you can click on the gallery button to view them individually.
Now the trip… The first part of the trip we spent surrounded by the beautiful red rocks of Sedona. One of the first thing we did was the Pink Jeep Tours. It was one of the best things we did the whole trip too. Basically we all piled into a jeep and climbed up and down a cliff.
Dad snapped this of me on the top of the cliff. Let’s just say it took me a LONG time to finally scoot over there. I was terrified. Plus forgive me it was about 7 am when this was taken, I look kind of tired and crazy!
This is one of the jeeps coming up the cliff…
…And this is our jeep going down…
…And that is what we went down. It was such a fun experience though. I loved it, and I would recommend it to ANYONE in Arizona! It was definitely a highlight of the trip!
That night we made the trip to the famous Red Rock crossing. I have a few pictures in the slideshow of this! My dad snapped a very funny picture of me doing “my thing”. He missed it though I was laying all over the ground about 10 seconds earlier. People were interesting here though, they thought it was “cool” to go swim in the water when you were trying to catch the 15 minute time the reflections were in the water. I couldn’t believe them, I had to ask them nicely to move.
We made some fun little “day trips” to different places like the old mining town of Jerome that was pretty neat to see, and then I begged to go to some ruins since we didn’t have time to go to Mesa Verde. We found some cool ruins called Montezuma’s Castle. There is photo of it in the slideshow, also. This place amazed me. I am a major history buff. I am the girl who goes to the museums and historical sites on vacation and not to the malls. The ruins were very high in cliffs as you can see in the picture of me up near them. I have no clue how the natives got to their dwelling or how they ever got down. It would scare me to death to live up that high.
Isn’t it really, really high up? I just don’t know how!
We also made a trip up to this really strange and cool mansion on Route 66 and then set off to see the San Fransisco peaks. This was the funniest thing ever, there was SNOW! In the middle of May in Arizona there was SNOW! Dad and I had a really funny snow fight, and then left 
Oh and it was COLD!
While we were in Sedona, I found this artist I fell in love with. His name is Douglas E. Andrews and his paintings were perfectly realistic and beautiful. I ended up getting a small copy of this painting which is in my room now. One thing that amazed me, as I left this gallery I looked to see this funny thing outside.
Wow, people improve and change. He makes incredible artwork now!
We then made our trip to the Grand Canyon, somewhere I have been many times but I still love it so much!
I allowed my Dad to get one shot of me! I hate my picture to be taken, which is really ironic since I am a photographer. I just feel very strange and uncomfortable. Plus mom always complains that I have a fake smile the minute the camera turns to me. She says I can be laughing but if a camera comes near, the smile becomes fake. Oh well!
I find it hilarious that even though I had a DSLR and dad a little camera people always asked him to take the photos first. He always handed the camera to me, and I hope everyone got a good shot of them at the Grand Canyon. Free little mini sessions? haha
Our last two stops were Antelope Canyon which was amazing until I almost lost my remote for my camera. Dad luckily found it on the trip back. That was an amazing experience in which we took a crazy truck that swerved all over the sand to this little whole in a rock wall. It was breathe-taking when you entered it, however. There are a few shots in the slideshow. In the same town we had quite a scare about our tour. Since we were so close to Utah, our cell phone clocks all changed to a different hour. We completely thought we had missed the tours, it was quite a scary experience! Lastly we went to the Glen Canyon Dam and took a float tour. This was absolutely amazing. We got to go down the Dam in an awesome tunnel. The only bad part of this, was because of the pressure my lens ended up cracking! I was really upset but luckily it got all fixed. We basically floated on this big raft all the way from Glen Canyon to the start of the rapids that start in the Grand Canyon. We stopped at Horseshoe Bend to look at some Hieroglyphics and I found this cute lizard.
I really liked him. You can see the top of Horseshoe Bend on my pictures. It is the round rock with water going around it. Well that is a funny story too. My dad and I hiked a good mile to this place to see the famous Horseshoe Bend. I had always wondered why pictures of this place were so amazing to come by. I found out why when I got there. Usually there are bars around places like these to keep you from falling. Here there was just a complete 10,000 foot drop off to where we had been earlier that day. It took me a good 45 minutes to slowly inch and then lean my camera over the edge. I then ran back to safety as fast as I could. It was SCARY. The end of the float tour though we got to have an AWESOME experience. Do you know what this is?
That is a full ABC film crew filming the biggest loser. They also filmed us as we came by because the contestants were riding out to the competition. So if you see a dorky girl with a camera on the edge of a float. THATS ME!
The last thing that happened on this trip was my site crashed while we were at the Grand Canyon. Completely deleted. So I had a hilarious and scary time completely redoing my site on vacation. haha
I had an ABSOLUTELY incredible trip, there are tons of funny stories I am forgetting and fun things I forgot to tell you about! I am sorry for such a long post and so image heavy but I hope you got a little bit more of a taste of me. Wait for a Friday post about Thanksgiving next week, and then get ready for another trip the next. Now the slideshow of the REAL images…
Great photos on the slideshow……nice trip