National Park Free Days: Tuzigoot and Montezuma

Did you know that the admission fees to all National Parks are waived this week?! Get out there!

In my "Living a Life You Love" series I talked about why we feel so strongly about exploring where we live. It's such a special part of our relationship as a couple and a family! So this past Monday Cameron took his last day of leave for the school year and we went exploring some new sites in Arizona. And we had a ball! Nothing fancy, but it was fabulous! 

We started our trip by heading down through Oak Creek Canyon and Sedona. We didn't get out to play in the water, but we still loved the green and the gorgeous canyon.

Our first main stop was Tuzigoot National Monument. After spending 2 summers working for the National Park Service at Fort Bowie National Historic Site, we have a special spot in our hearts for the National Parks. We just bought our 2nd America the Beautiful Pass and plan on using it fiercely this summer. It's great! We don't feel like we have to spend hours and hours at the park dragging around cranky kids to get our admission fee worth. We can just go and spend 30 minutes to and hour and be done because we're not trying to get $20-$40 worth of an adventure out of the experience. Pretty much we just have to hit up 4 parks with a fee entrance and we've make our pass pay off. We plan on hitting way over that number this summer!

But I digress.

Tuzigoot!

This was a great park! We LOVED it! Darrow could run the trail easily, which meant that he loved it too. 

 Of course he's picking his nose. Thanks child. 

 It was soo cool to get to go up on top of the ruins! The view was so pretty! They sure picked a great spot to live!

Darrow is into jumping now and spent a good chunk of the day jumping along the trails. Man he was worn out by the end!

From Tuzigoot we made a detour up to see Jerome. It's a cute town up on the hill!  

From Jerome we went over to Montezuma's Castle. I remember seeing the sign for this as a child and the images I came up with in my head were spectacular! The ruins didn't end up being as cool as my little kid mind made up, but it was still neat to go see them and, again, a perfect place for Darrow.

It's been too long since we were somewhere with trees! Darrow couldn't get enough of watching the shadows go across his arm. I'd almost forgotten that he did that!

Our last stop for the day was Montezuma's Well. We almost skipped this, and we would have regretted it. I think it was our favorite stop of the day! It's amazing to see this bowl in the desert. The water pours into the bowl from the bottom, and then there is a small natural tunnel off on one side that the water spills out of, traveling through the hill and out the side, keeping the water fresh instead of getting stagnant! It's really something!

Here's where the water comes out of the hill on the other side. It's really amazing! 

We thoroughly enjoyed our family day together exploring the state! Winslow is perfectly situated with all the National Parks around. We have so many day trips to choose from! This gave us a taste of summer, and now we can't wait for school to get over so that we can get to all the upcoming weddings and hit as many National Parks possible!

Living a Life You Love: Tip #2-Just Do It

Tip #2 in a week long series on Living a Life You Love.

Click the links to read the series Intro and Tip #1. 

Tip #2: Just Do It.

I'm going all Nike on you here. Just do it. Quit making excuses.

Want to join water aerobics, but your friends think it's weird? Jump in the pool anyway! Be the weird kid! Want to go see the birds take off from the lake in the morning? Set the alarm...it's only that one morning of getting up early, not a life time of lost sleep! Want to see a funky little shop you passed last week? Stop by on your way to the grocery store just to take a peek!

So many times we come up with excuses to not do things that we really would love to do. some excuses really are legitimate. Like if you only have $15 in your bank account and driving up the mountain to go camping would take $20 in gas. Or a broken foot keeping you from running a marathon. Obviously there are real excuses to not do things. I'm not talking about those though. I'm talking about excuses like not doing something neat because you don't want to miss the next episode of Once Upon a Time. Those excuses are the ones that kill the magic. 

Not too long ago we looked up the best time to see Fall Foliage near here and found it was the peak weekend. But it was already 3PM on Sunday. We were half way through the long weekend and the colors were at least an hours drive away. We hemmed and hawed for half an hour.  There's not much time left. I don't want to pack the car. I don't want to unpack the camping gear and clean up after. I'm tired. We don't have good camping food. What if Darrow hates camping and it's miserable? Excuse after excuse rolled out. 

Thankfully we finally just decided to bite the bullet and do it. By 4:10 we'd thrown the tent, clothes, blankets, pillows, and various food items in the car and we headed out. We got to the north end of the mountain at sunset with just enough light to get camp set up. It was chilly, the ground was hard (my neck and shoulder still hurt a week later...I'm a wuss), and we had bean burritos for dinner. It wasn't the most comfortable and yummy camping experience, but we enjoyed visiting, sitting by the fire, looking at the stars, and watching Darrow explore with his tiny flashlight. 

In the morning we broke camp at sunrise, finished the driving tour around the mountain to see the colors, did some Halloween costume supply shopping, and went back home. It wasn't a vacation you'll see on Pinterest. We hurt. I had more laundry to do than normal. We were tired from the lack of sleep. But it was completely worth it! We feel closer together as a family. It makes us smile. It made it easier to jump into this next week. And we have some fun memories! 

Had we kept hemming and hawing and making excuses we would have missed this. We wouldn't have these memories of Darrow's first camping trip, of the leaves (not spectacular by East Coast standards, but pretty good for AZ!), seeing the spectacular night sky, or the family time.

Moral of the story:

Let go of your excuses and fears and just go do it!