The weather was great, in the mid 70's although with the humidity it felt like the 90's. The mexican food was incredible, as were the drinks. We almost tried absinthe for the first time but the restaurant had run out the night we were there.

A lovely weekend in the mid 80's had us hiking in Dreamy Draw again, and this time I remembered the camera. Photos are here.

They allow hiking, biking and horse back riding up here on many of the trails, and the park is huge so you only run into people occasionally. Several times though, we ran into one group of people on horse back who had lost their dog after it got startled by a car backfiring. We kept an eye out for her, and tried walking up to some of the ridges for a better view, but didn't see any sign of her. Hope they found her!

Check me out at www.monstercommute.com , you need to click on the shop tab then the t-shirt tab. I'm the one in the dark orange shirt that has three weird monster cars on it and I got to keep the shirt. We had a lot of fun. She took a ton of pictures so they might change. My smart car and my co-workers convertible light blue bug were in a bunch of pictures as well. I hope those make it to the site too.

Tonight was the final night of Glendale's several months long xmas celebrations, and they finished it in style by adding lots of hot-air balloons to the party already going on in the streets & parks of their historic downtown.

We hung out there for a couple of hours, along with half of Phoenix judging by the parking situation. Luckily we saw a tiny sliver of a space on a side-street a few blocks out of town, and Sally's Smart Car squeezed into it effortlessly. Then we walked around downtown checking out loads of hot air balloons, bands on almost every street corner, movies playing, and the general fun-fair atmosphere. My favorite balloon was the Spiderman one! It was fun, and we really want to go for a hot-air balloon ride now. Check out more pictures here.

First we headed to Sedona, where the only snow we saw was a snowball in the middle of the road that had fallen off the roof of a car. It was warm, sunny and beautiful so we hung around for a couple of hours before carrying on further north towards Flagstaff, following the old road instead of the freeway, and here we ran into snow and lots of it - yay!

We pulled over at the side of the road to take some photos, and Sally ran into the snow bank only to sink up to her knee straight away. I got a "You could come help get me out instead of laughing & taking photos!" within seconds. After dragging her out, a large SUV pulled up and the friendliest lesbians in the world got out. We chatted for a few minutes and took each others pictures, and then it was back in the car and off to Flagstaff.

Flagstaff was buried in snow when we got there. They'd cleared the roads, and bits of the sidewalk, but the everything was still just covered. We hung out for a few hours, took some more pictures, and saw the craziest sunset as we were about to leave. Photos are here.

If you remember from my recent post, this is Chihully glass artwork spread amongst the cacti all around this amazingly beautiful park. I remembered the camera and spare batteries, but when we got to the park I suddenly realized I'd forgotten my tripod - grrrr! Still a lot of the pictures came out pretty well, and I really experimented with the camera's settings to try & get better night shots then I had on our previous 2 visits.

My photos (here) don't even began to capture how stunning this was to experience, but if you're not in Phoenix right now this is as close as you're gonna get... enjoy them now, and start saving up for a flight for next December ;-)