Arizona, Sedona: Jerome First, Red Rock Second

Sedona is the subject of this travel journal entry, but we actually visited a small town called Jerome on the way, entitling it to half of this page. Therefore, anyone interested in just Sedona should scroll halfway down, but if you want to find out more about the charming little town of Jerome, keep your eyes focused exactly where they are. Yes, right here, that's right...

The drive to Jerome from Phoenix took us past more arid Arizona mountain scenery that was lacking almost any sort of vegetation. In the Phoenix area, we were able to see many of the unique saguaro cacti, that resemble green stick people with arms, but even those started disappearing as we climbed to higher altitudes in the SUV we had rented for our road trip from Arkansas to California. The route we took to get to Jerome from Phoenix was north on Interstate 17 and then west on highway 260, which turned into alternate highway 89, leading us to the small town.

Jerome has been called "America's Most Vertical City" and "Largest Ghost Town in America". The first nickname was clearly granted to the town because of its elevation (5,200 feet) and the fact that the town is located on a steep mountainside. The second nickname has been given over time, most likely because there were, and still are, a lot of ghosts there. Jerome was situated high on top of Cleopatra Hill and is a historic copper mining town, once known as the wickedest town in the west. That's enough about Jerome, we can't be asked to add any more information for you today.

Driving into town was exciting; we climbed to a much higher altitude pretty quickly and turned several sharp corners as we made our way into the centre of Jerome. There, we parked our SUV and started walking around the place to get a feel for it, passing by many quaint little restaurants and gift shops and even deciding to go inside one of the souvenir shops. There were some nice and equally unusual (freaky) things inside, which you can see in our photos.

There were some historical sights in Jerome that we enjoyed seeing and the view out across the landscape was beautiful, since we had climbed to an elevation higher than everything around us. There wasn't too much to do in Jerome except shop and eat; the one tourist attraction we did decide to go for, though, was a visit to a pottery museum, where we could see pottery being made. However, we arrived there 15 minutes before the next show and agreed we couldn't wait that long. It had been a spur-of-the-moment thing, anyway, so we weren't too upset about giving the tour a miss.

After an hour in Jerome, we had seen everything we wanted to and we walked back to our vehicle to continue driving to Sedona. Sedona was very close to Jerome and it only took us half an hour to reach Red Rock State Park, the main attraction of the town. We took the alternate highway 89 route back towards highway 260, but then we continued on alternate highway 89 until we reached Sedona and the park.

Red Rock State Park was a great way to see the northern Arizona landscape with its striking red rock, which was much different than the southern part of the state. When we arrived at the visitor centre inside the park, the park ranger told us about the trails inside that would have taken anywhere from an hour to a few days. We chose to drive along the park scenic route instead and stop at a few viewpoints along the way.

The rock formations inside the state park were the most beautiful shades of red and there were some stunning formations in the distance. The ground was coated in a fine, red dust that stood out with the green plants growing on its surface. At the first place we stopped, we chatted with an Italian guy and his family who had chosen to visit the park because they had spent too much money in Las Vegas, and needed some less costly attractions to finish out their summer holiday. We hoped that wasn't an ominous omen for our upcoming stay in Las Vegas two weeks later...

After saying goodbye using our best attempt at the Italian farewell word (we aren't even going to try to write the word here, since it is only a slight spoken possibility for either of us), we continued to drive along the scenic route within the park to look at more of the amazing landscape; we stopped another couple of times to take in the views and to snap more pictures. Once we left the park, it only took us ten minutes to arrive at Sedona's main street, lined with many souvenir shops, restaurants, cafes, mystical fortune tellers and palm readers, surrounded by beautiful multi-coloured mountains looming off in the distance.

Despite many choices of things to see and do, Angel's Mexican Restaurant in Sedona was our first and last stop in town. We wanted to work on our travel journal somewhere and decided some tortilla chips and salsa were needed, as they always seemed to be whenever a Mexican restaurant promptly and pleasantly presented itself to us. Even though we weren't massively hungry, and even after eating loads of chips and lots of salsa, we still tried an appetiser called a "cheese crisp", which ended up being a large pizza-like fried tortilla covered with lots and lots of gooey, runny, delicious cheese. It was WAY too big and too much food, but we did enjoy trying it and ate as much as we could before leaving the restaurant.

After a couple of hours eating and writing inside Angel's, we left the place and drove along Sedona's main street, heading out of town. We decided to move on to Flagstaff that day instead of staying a night in Sedona, which had been our original plan. With Flagstaff only being an hour's drive away north through the mountains, we expected a nice journey to get there. As we thought, we were rewarded with great views of the mountains between the two cities and you can read about this when you continue to the next journal entry.