Vacation Report: Home Sweet Home

And by home, I mean Flagstaff, o' course. Look, I love Washington state, I adore Seattle, but Flagstaff is where I grew up. It's my city. And I'm thrilled to be back here for a nice, long visit.

Today was mostly an intensive travel day to get here, so there's a lot of shots from the car. Here's the Colorado River, just over the Arizona border from Needles:


An awesome road cut near Kingman, where you can see the sedimentary layers piled up like a tiramisu:


The San Francisco Peaks filling our windshield on I40 just outside of Williams:


Ant lion's trap in the soil under a Ponderosa pine. Ants fall into that little cone-shaped hole, can't climb out because the dirt slides down the steep walls, and BAM - ant lion emerges from the bottom of the hole and the poor little ant is lunch:


One of the main telescopes at Lowell Observatory, where we saw the moon as I've never seen it before:



This is me getting an eyeful of moon mountains, craters and maria. Lemme tell ya, you can see it all you like in books, but there is nothing like putting your eye to a telescope and seeing it live:


Flagstaff city lights from Mars hill, taken from the observatory:


And a huge hunk of the meteor that blasted Meteor Crater:



It's good to be home.