Vacation in the Desert

If you would have asked me a year ago where I would be for my February mid-winter break, I would have said "Hawaii! For my honeymoon!" When we planned our wedding last year, we decided to delay our tropical honeymoon. An escape during the cold, gray season in Seattle sounded like a better idea than leaving in July. But as winter drew closer, we realized that a trip this year was probably unlikely. I'm sure someday we'll go to Hawaii (we've both never been) but we chose Arizona instead.

Steve had been having dreams of driving through the desert, and I've always been a fan of cactus and sunshine. So that's what we did. We stayed with my grandparents in Mesa, and went to a spring training game. And even though the weather was unusually cool, it was warm enough to sit outside with t-shirts and sunglasses.


The ballpark hotdogs were especially good with jalapenos, so we each had two, and then I had a stomachache (luckily a quick nap on the lawn cured it).


The following day, we took a mini road trip to Tucson and stopped at Saguaro National Park. We picked out a hike that was described in the trail guide as "easy" (it's not like we couldn't have chosen "strenuous" but hey, we were on vacation) and I took a bunch of pictures of plants and cacti.







See? A lot of cacti.
And then I took some video. This is the first time I've used my new camera for capturing video, and it was pretty fun. I decided to edit the clips together because I realized-- these will become our family's home videos some day.
In some ways, this short trip was our delayed honeymoon. It was the first time we had traveled by plane together, just for fun, since we've been married. We ate good food, relaxed and slept, laughed at hair hats and wolf fleeces (only found in Arizona swap meets), and even wrote our initials in the sand. Overall, it was a great vacation.