All packed and ready to head home (Image by the Jayasinghe family).
The last day of our trip! We were heading back home! The plan was to drive from Phoenix to our home in San Diego without making any stops, about a six to eight hour drive. We helped our parents pack the van and made sure that we had not left anything in the hotel room. We were sad to leave but were happy to be coming back home.
We drove on Interstate 10 West, along the way, we stopped at Quartzite to get gas. We stopped at the same gas station we had stopped, 11 days ago, when we were starting our trip! When we got to Palm Springs, we stopped at the Cabazon Outlet shops to stretch our legs, and to see if there were any after Christmas sales still going on. We found some really nice rain jackets at reasonable prices at the Columbia outlet store. After having some lunch at the food court, we headed back on the road. We cut across from Interstate 10 to Interstate 15 (South) by taking state Route 79. It was a long drive, and we got to our house at about 6:00 in the evening. We were all very tired, but it was great to be back home after a most enjoyable vacation.
We are almost at the end of our trip! This was the last day of our stay at the resort and we were going to head back home the next day. We had been on the road for eleven days, but we were looking forward to seeing our cute dog Rocky again, who had been boarded all this time!
Mom and our grandma decided to treat themselves, and went to the spa to get a pedicure, and something called a facial. My sisters and I convinced our dad to go to the pool, even though it was not all that warm of a day. We went to the river ranch and played in the main pool. The pool has a water fall, and we sat under it, and also played marco-polo, a pool game. We also found a volleyball, and tried to play some pool volleyball. We were not very good at getting the ball over the net.
Where is this ball going! (Image by the Jayasinghe family).Just missed it! (Image by the Jayasinghe family).I am ready, I will hit it this time (Image by the Jayasinghe family).
We played until our mom came back from the spa. Then we went back to the room and got dressed to play tennis. The hotel room includes a complimentary hour of tennis. The day before we had booked a court for an hour. We were excited to play because we had never played tennis before. At first, my sisters and I kept missing the ball, but our mother ,and father who had played tennis when they were children, showed us how. Slowly, we got the hang of it, and towards the end, we got the ball over the net. We really enjoyed it! We played tennis for an hour. It turned out to be quite a warm day, and all that running around made us thirsty, so our mom and dad ordered three piña colada drinks. We sat and drank them by the pool, and were they yummy!
Biltmore mall Phoenix (Image by the Jayasinghe family).
We went back to the room to relax and played Rummikub, Blokus, Chess, and cards. After we had relaxed a bit we decided to go explore a mall in Phoenix. We drove to the Biltmore Fashion Park. The Biltmore (mall), is a outdoor upscale mall, and we saw several stores that we hadn’t seen in a mall before. We walked around the mall for a little while, window shopping. Then, my sisters and I got very hungry and we looked for a place to eat, but nothing caught our fancy. Finally, we decided to leave the Biltmore and go to Olive Garden.
Olive Garden, One of our favorite places to eat (Image by the Jayasinghe family).
Our whole family loves the Olive Garden restaurant. We love the breadsticks, and our parents love the Fagioli soup. Kiran, Svara, and I had the cheese ravioli from the kids menu. Our grandma, got the soup and salad combination. Our mom got the Chicken Scampi. Our father got the Braised Beef and Tortellini, and our grandpa got the Garlic Rosemary Chicken Breast that comes with mashed potatoes and spinach. For dessert, we had what is the best part of Olive Garden for us. This wonderful desert is called a dolcini. At Olive Garden, there are different flavors. Our mom and dad always get the tiramisu dolcini, but Kiran, Svara, and I just pick randomly. We really enjoyed the meal, and went back to our room with full stomachs!
After sleeping in until 10:30 (pretty late, huh?), we walked to the River Ranch again. Only, this time, we were going to play miniature golf. Well, really, we were going to play tennis, but every single court was booked up, so we decided to play miniature golf instead. There were eighteen holes. To get through all eighteen, took us about TWO HOURS! Can you believe it? We tried to get our dad to play another round but we had no luck.
The three golfers (Image by the Jayasinghe family).
We went back to our hotel room, had some lunch and settled in for some board games. We played “Blokus” and chess, in which I won. The my sisters and I, also made-up a game using chess pieces, which we called “kingdoms”. We had fun coming up with the rules for this game and playing a few rounds.
In the hotel lobby area (Image by the Jayasinghe family).
After our games we took a stroll around the resort. We hadn’t explored the hotel yet. We walked past a couple of pools they have for each of the buildings in the resort, looked into Rico’s American Grill (a restaurant on the premises), and bought hot chocolate in the main lobby building. After we went back to our room our grandparents decided to take us out for dinner to celebrate our birthdays. Mom looked on the internet for interesting places to eat, and we finally settled on Aunt Chilada’s. Aunt Chilada’s has a rich history. The land that the restaurant is on has had some sort of business for over a hundred years! It used to be a place where miners working in the mercury mines and smelters stayed. Before that there used to be a general store. To learn more about the restaurant’s history, check out Aunt Chilada’s website.
Aunt Chilada’s Restaurant (Image by the Jayasinghe family).
We, the kids, ordered cheese quesadillas, our mom and grandparents had burritos, and our dad had some kind of very messy, and very spicy dish, called the Jalapeño Steak Fajita (fa-hee-ta). It had a bunch of Jalapeños. I don’t know how he ate it! He said it was very good. I also tried the shrimp tacos, which can only be described by one word: scrumptious! Then we drove sleepily back to the resort. We took a warm shower, put our pajamas on, and collapsed into bed.
We woke up early in the morning, we were so excited! Today was our birthday! Well, actually it was just my twin sister and my birthday. We were turning 10. Our little sister’s 7th birthday was coming up in a couple of months. To celebrate all our birthdays, Mom had booked a horse riding session at the Ponderosa Stables in Phoenix.
Ponderosa Stables is located in South Mountain Park, the largest city-owned park in the world. The Ponderosa is a working stables and houses more than fifty horses. The owner of the Ponderosa Stables lives in Colorado and only visit this location once a year. Apparently he is about 84 years old and remembers the names of all his horses. He owns about 2,000 horses and several ranches. There were cowboys and cowgirls doing their daily chores, like cleaning up the stables and feeding the horses. We didn’t know horses were that big! We had never seen one up close before. A couple of cowboys and cowgirls brought out our horses, and helped us get up onto the saddle using a set of steps, but it was still pretty hard work!
Navaldo the cowboy (Image by the Jayasinghe Family).
Once we had all settled down on our saddles, including our grandma and grandpa, we set off down the trail. Our guide was a seventy-year old cowboy named Nivaldo. He looked like a true cowboy. He was at the front of the pack holding on to rope that was tied to my sister Svara’s horse. When Nivaldo started, all our horses followed. They were very well trained trail horses. We also had a cowgirl guide at the rear end, because there were seven of us and, also because there were three kids.
All seven of us on the trail! (Image by the Jayasinghe family).Who knew riding a horse could be this much fun! (Image by the Jayasinghe family)
Our ride was not at all what our mother expected. She was expecting a ride on a paved road. Instead, we rode our horses on a fairly rugged trail; through trenches, over rocks, and down steep hills. At one point one of the guide horses came next to mine, and my horse bucked. That was scary, but exciting! Apparently these trail horses do not like when another horse come next to them. They are trained to walk in single file. We, the kids, really enjoyed our ride and were really sad when the ride ended. Our parents enjoyed it too, but not as much we kids did, and I think they were relieved to be on safe ground!
Riding those horses made us hungry! (Image by the Jayasinghe family).
Afterwards, we were treated to a cowboy style breakfast: eggs, bacon, and thick pancakes, all cooked on skillets.
After eating, we drove back to the resort. On the way we stopped at “Nothing Bunt Cakes”, a cake shop. Nothing Bunt Cakes makes the best cakes ever! The night before we had looked online to see if there was a store in Phoenix, and to our surprise we found one not far from the hotel . We were so excited! We bought a eight inch bundt cake and a small bunt cake each (they call them buntlets) to celebrate our birthdays later in the day. After we got back to our hotel room we relaxed a bit, and then we changed into swimsuits, and headed to the “River Ranch”, where all the pools and the Lazy River were!
Relaxing in the lazy river (Image by the Jayasinghe family).
We grabbed floaty’s and floated slowly down the river – and when I say slowly, I mean really slowly! There really was no current; it was mostly just the wind, which was at that time, a very slight breeze. After floating around (or in my sister Svara’s case, playing around), we decided to try the water slide. Svara slipped down fast enough, but the rest of us got stuck along the way. I think because we were too heavy for the water! To top it off, we were able to enjoy food by the Lazy River: cranberry juice, chicken tenders, and fries.
After a most enjoyable time at the “River Ranch” we returned to our rooms very tired. We relaxed in the room and played some chess with our dad. At about tea time, we all got together to cut our bunt cakes to celebrate our birthdays. We put candles on the cakes and our parents and grandparents sang happy birthday. Then we dug into the cakes! They were delicious! Everyone ate at least one slice. The day had been a long one, but an extremely exciting one with new experiences. To cap it all off we had a relaxing bubble bath, we set up our beds, snuggled under the covers and watched “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”. The movie was exciting, and scary. What a great way to end the day! Once we hit the pillows, we fell into a very deep sleep.
We woke up in Tucson and it was a bright sunny day. Today we were heading to Phoenix, the last stop on our trip to Arizona. Our mom and dad had booked a suite at the Hilton Squaw Peak Resort in Phoenix as our tenth birthday present. This Resort is arranged like a mini village with streets and crossroads. The whole Resort is 27 acres. When we checked in, the front desk gave us a map of the Resort to find our way! The resort has hotel rooms, suites, as well as Casitas, or small houses. In the middle of the resort is The River Ranch recreational area. The River Ranch has a pool with a waterfall, a recreational pool with a volleyball net and a basketball hoop, a lazy river, a waterslide, a tad pool (a tiny pool), mini-golf, tennis courts, and basketball courts. The Resort also has two restaurants, the Hole-In-The-Wall, and the Rico’s American Grill. In addition to these two restaurants there is also the Slim Pickens cafe, which sells finger foods like nachos and chicken strips, and the Cactus Rock Creamery which sells ice cream.
We checked in and went to our rooms. They were big! Each suite had a living room with a couch with a sofa bed, and a separate bedroom with two queen beds. Plenty of room for us to stretch out and enjoy the last five days of our trip. After we moved all of our bags from the van to the suite, and had relaxed a little, we felt like going for a swim. We had not been swimming during this whole trip, and we really missed swimming! We had heard that the Tocasierra Spa, Salon, and Fitness Center had a lap pool, and were very excited about swimming there. Unfortunately, the receptionist at the spa informed us that the lap pool was for adults only. We were so frustrated, it’s not like we were going to play around, we are USA swimmers after all! We eventually swam some laps in the recreational pool.
Don’t burn my marshmallow! (image by the Jayasinghe family).
After the swim, we were hungry, hungry, hungry. For dinner, we decided to go to the Hole-In-The-Wall Restaurant. They had barbecue food. It was delicious but we thought the portions were a little small for the price. For desert, we got s’mores, and it came with a little pot with a fire in it so that you could toast your own marshmallows on the sticks and make our s’mores right at our table.
Map of our travels on day 4 from Flagstaff to Sedona, AZ, with a stop at the Meteor Crater.
We woke up at the Hilton Garden Inn, Flagstaff. And guess what? It was snowing! We were really excited about the snow because we haven’t seen snow falling before. We went outside and enjoyed the falling snow for a little before we had breakfast. Then, we packed our bags and got in the van to head to our next destination, Sedona AZ. On the way to Sedona, we decided to take a detour and go to the Meteor Crater. From flagstaff we took interstate 40 east towards Winslow and followed directions to the Meteor Crater.
The Meteor Crater
At the Meteor Crater near Winslow, AZ. (Image by the Jayasinghe family).
The Meteor Crater is the worlds best reserved meteor impact site in the world. The impact happened about 50,000 years ago. It is one mile wide, and more than 550 feet deep. In winter, it can get very windy, but even though on normal days it isn’t that windy, it’s good to be prepared.
We went on a Guided Rim Trail Tour. The guide was really knowledgable and gave us a lot of interesting facts about the crater and its discovery. You can see directly into the crater when you are in the rim trail and the hike was a lot of fun. On the hike we also got to see some cool rocks including the Pulverized Coconino Sandstone. The wind was quite strong. We were scared thinking that our little sister would be blown away. Later we heard that there were wind gusts up to 60 miles per hour! We had fun even though the wind was strong.
On our way back from the Meteor Crater to Sedona, we went on this wonderful drive from Flagstaff to Sedona, on the Oak Creek Canyon Road (highway 89A south). Highway 89A has several sharp turns, and at first, our mom wasn’t too excited about the road, because she doesn’t exactly like windy roads, but pretty soon, the surroundings made her forget about the winding road, and she was oohing and aahing all the way. Actually, most of us did too. On either side of the road there were towering mountains, the trees were covered in snow, and there was a creek running beside the road. The landscape just captures you and it is really majestic. It is just indescribable.
We checked in to the Days Inn in Sedona. It was raining and there was a lot of fog. The rooms at the Days Inn were big, but they needed some updating. The room looked old and the carpets looked like they needed some cleaning. One of the heaters in one of the rooms did not work, and we had to ask the front desk to come and replace a couple of light bulbs. We gave this Days Inn two stars.
