Pleasantly Surprised In Sedona

When I entered our Sedona hotel in the GPS from Slide Rock State Park, it said it was less than ten miles away, but that it would take about fifty minutes!  We thought “that can’t be right!”, but soon enough we found ourselves in a one way lane of crawling traffic.  We thought “there must be an accident”, but it turned out that it was just everyone trying to get away to Sedona on Friday afternoon of the New Year weekend.  We heard from some lifelong locals that the traffic in the past week had been the worst they had ever seen.  It seems that Sedona is experiencing some growing pains.

We had booked a night with the last of D’s Marriott points at the Courtyard by Marriott in Sedona.  This was one of the nicest Courtyards we have stayed at!

I loved this room!  It felt so fresh and modern.  It made me want to put a mural in our house. 🙂

This was the view from our balcony.

It was a good thing that we stayed here last.  If we had started out with this hotel, we would have been sorely disappointed by the others!

This was the view from the rooftop lounge.

We ate dinner at Gerardo’s Italian Kitchen.

This was basically our only “real” restaurant meal since that fateful night in Holbrook.  D and I shared the Liguria Pizza, which had White Sauce, Thinly Sliced Rosemary Potatoes/Crispy Prosciutto di Parma/Fossil Creek Goat Cheese/Mozzarella Cheese/Topped With Baby Arugula tossed in Lemon Oil.  Yes, it was delicious as it looks! k ordered kids’ pasta with Alfredo sauce and n ordered a kids’ pepperoni pizza and they shared.  The restaurant was pretty busy and the atmosphere was cozy.

On our way out, wed tried a few of these Italian “cookies”, which were kind of like fried wonton strips dusted with powdered sugar.  Interesting.

Back at the hotel room, the kids watched some television through our Hulu account.

D took a dip in the heated pool.  Yes, he’s crazy.

We awoke to a lovely sunrise.

We took a little drive to downtown Sedona since we did not want to deal with the masses the day before.

The shops on the main street were not open yet, but they looked cute.  It seemed like the Red Rocks provided a scenic backdrop wherever we went.  If Santa Fe was a bit of a disappointment, Sedona surpassed our expectations.

We saw a turquoise McDonald’s and had to do a double-take.

For breakfast we stopped at Sedonuts.  Isn’t their logo ingenious?

A sweet way to end our trip.  And no, we did not eat them all in one sitting.