Family Trip to Arizona

After Christmas, my family headed to Arizona for a week-long family vacation. There were eight of us there, including: Mom, Dad, Brian, Emily (Brian’s finance), Me, Jeff, Katie, and Tom (Katie’s boyfriend). We stayed in a rented house about 30 minutes outside Tuscon, and had a nice view of the mountains.

It was pretty relaxing – we usually slept in, and I spent a good amount of time sitting around the house reading. Brian barbequed almost every day we were there, and we had a few family game nights. Emily taught us rummy, and I re-realized my love for the game Catch Phrase, which resulted in some classic clues and guesses, such as:

Me: When you dry up a raisin, it turns into this…
Mom: Prune
*Which was the right word, even though my clue made no sense.

Katie: Oh man, I don’t know, I’m not sure how to give clues for this word…
Me: Well, say something! What does it sound like?
Katie: It sounds like orange.
Me: What?!? That’s the one word that nothing rhymes with!
*The word was actually orient, which I guess does sound like orange… kind of.

Me: It’s in French. It means finished!
Mom: Finale?
Me: Uh, no, um, (time runs out)
*Me, realizing too late that ‘fin’ was probably the thing on a fish, not the ending slide of an artsy French film.

Jeff: In Mexico, you celebrate a quincinera… You know, a celebration like that?
Tom: ?
*Jeff, trying to give a clue for Sweet Sixteen in the most complicated way possible. (As opposed to something like, “opposite of sour; number after fifteen.”

Tom: It’s something you might do with your hair in the morning. If you’re feeling really ambitious.
Girls: ?
*Tom, trying to get us to guess “braid” – an apparently “ambitious” hair-do.

We also did a bit of sight-seeing. On one of our first days we went out to Saguaro National Park, which is full of Saguaro cacti (those are the ones with the 90 degree arms you think of when you think of cacti). We went from there to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum, which is oddly named. It’s not really a museum, it’s more like a zoo. And it’s not like a normal zoo, it’s more like you’re just in the desert – there are no walls enclosing the space, just an entrance with parking lots and then lots of walking trails around the dessert. Some animals are just roaming, since it is the desert, and others are in cages that fit it well with the surroundings, so you don’t really notice them until you’re right in that area. We saw a show where they had a bunch of hawks flying around, which was pretty cool. Multiple times they swooped within inches of all the people standing and watching.

My favorite outing, however, was on New Years Day. We went to Bear Canyon to hike the Seven Falls Trail. It was a really pretty dessert/mountain area. The trail starts out as a wide road (and is even paved in some areas), but then it goes off the beaten path and becomes a rocky, narrow path through the brush – which was really fun. Then the path came to a river – you could hear it before you could see it. The path actually crosses over it, so you have to balance stepping from rock to rock to follow it. Very fun!

We celebrated New Years Eve all together. I bought a “party of eight” so we all looked pretty ridiculous in party hats and tiaras. We barbequed, as per usual, watched a movie, and watched the ball drop in NYC (on Arizona time, which was actually two hours after it had really happened.