Connie, Jan, Cheri and I were the four girl cousins that grew up together in the San Francisco bay area. Connie and I are one year apart, so we had one adventure after another and became very close. Cheri and Jan kind of got left out...Jan being too old and Cheri being too young. However, as we reached that wonderous mature age of our lives where age no longer matters, we decided it would be fun to have a Cuz'n Trip to reconnect. Our first trip was in 2006 to the south west in Connie's motorhome. The picture below is of the four of us with our Happy Camper T-shirts while visiting Zion National Park.
Our next trip, in 2007, happened because Connie had been after us for several years to join her on a trip to Mexico to see Copper Canyon. The previous year Cheri had a bad experience in Mexico and didn't want to return to that country again. (She got extremely ill..Montezuma had a big revenge!) So, she decided not to join us.
We took Connie's motorhome down into Mexico and then Connie drove it onto the bed of a train. The train slowly meandered through the mountains until it reached Copper Canyon, stopping at little villages along the way. It was truly a wonderful trip and one of the highlights of my life. I love Mexico! I could do an entire blog on this trip..it was great! Below is a picture of the three of us in a resturant in Mexico.
This year, in April of 2008, Jan and I took up Connie's suggestion of a luxurious week in Sedona using her time-share at a spa. We spent the week being pampered, looking at art and hiking in the wonderful countryside of Sedona. After the April Cuz'n trip I went out to California to see Cheri. She was in bad shape, but I didn't realize how bad, because it was the last time I would see her before she died.
Due to our various schedules, Connie and I happened to fly into Arizona a day earlier than Jan so we spent the day visiting the Botanical Garden in Scottsdale. Truly a wonderful experience to see all those strange desert plants...and so many of them in bloom!
Connie and I had all kinds of fun photographing the flowers that were in bloom everywhere!
I never knew cactus could be purple!
Or fuzzy!
The colors, textures and shapes were inspirational...I felt like I had landed on some other planet and eveything was new to me.
When I was young and had just moved to southern Calif, outside Palm Springs with my new husband, I had a very hard time adjusting to the desert. Connie, who loves the desert, taught me how to see the beauty in it. Through her I came to see the desert as God's abstract expressionism and learned to love the shapes and forms. This botanical garden just reinforced that feeling.
Their butterfly garden was filled with more than butterflies...LOTS of children were in there too! It was fun watching the kids get so excited about an insect...but then, so did we!
And, of course, there were art installations in the garden. Connie and I had to join the kids in crawling around in what looked like a giant tumble weed...
It was a great day filled with the wonders of nature. If you are ever in Scottsdale be sure to stop by the botanical garden and enjoy it too!
The rest of the Sedona trip will follow in a later blog...time for me to go back to work!....
Our first adventure outside of town took us to this unique shopping area where we enjoyed a nice rest for our feet in their rocking chairs...
After our rest we decided to go in search of a Vortex. Now, any of you that don't know about Sedona and Vortex's have been living in a cave. There are Vortex's all over Sedona. These special places are suppose to be areas of spiritual connection...and so we set out to find one...
We were told that there was one in the general location of the Cathedral mountains...and so we hiked, and hiked, and hiked...
We finally gave up and decided that between the three of us we had enough spirituality to create our own Vortex, so we sat down and meditated. We were so in tune with "the powers that be" that some birds even came up to us...we saw that as a good sign since our last name, Vogel, means bird in German...so we must have been on some sort of good wave length! HA!
We said adios to the birds and hiked back to the parking lot to have lunch.
Of course along the way we saw many beautiful flowers blooming...and I just couldn't resist taking pictures...
