Vacation - Part II

Before we travel to Arizona I have to include two of our favorite food spots in San Diego. This first one is our favorite breakfast place. It is called Hash House a Go Go and has the most enormous portion sizes I have ever seen. We normally get the sticky hot granola that is served in this HUGE bowl. It isn't nearly full but the size of the bowl alone is a bit intimidating. It is loaded with a ton of fresh, yummy fruit which is normally hard to get while traveling. Josie LOVES the fruit and can polish off a good portion of it herself. It comes with 4 or so large, juicy strawberries. Needless to say, Josie made it to the strawberries before I made it to my camera! I have to say that looking around at what other customers are eating/ordering is half the fun/torment of the place. Sometimes just looking at the piles of food on people's plates is a bit nauseating. Seriously, the portions sizes are out of control. We feel a bit less guilty since ours is mostly just fruit and cereal.

Our other favorite food spot is Yogurtland. We are both really big fans of frozen yogurt and not just because it is better for you than ice cream. We both agree that real ice cream is just too rich. Unfortunately, Seattle doesn't have many frozen yogurt places anymore. Yogurtland really is the BEST frozen yogurt place either of us have been too. You can see behind Marty and Josie, off to the right that they have 18 different serve yourself flavors. Then they have dozens of toppings including fresh fruit, nuts, candies, cookies, just about everything. And it is only 30 cents an oz. We didn't hold back at all and would normally get two pretty full cups for under $5.

OK, enough about food. Onto the desert.

The landscape on the way to Phoenix was desert, rocks and there wasn't anything really truly green for MILES. It made us appreciate the lushness of the PNW.

Josie did AMAZINGLY well on all three long legs of our road trip. She spent some time engrossed in her German Backyardigans video, a lot of time requesting songs from Marty's ipod and some time sleeping. She didn't really even have one major melt down. It made the car trips much more enjoyable.

Here is one of the desert rest stops. Very flat, dry and brown.

We were about an hour away from Grandma and Papa's house when Marty noticed a sign that said "Petroglyph National Park" This kind of purposeful detouring was what made him what to take a "road trip" in the first place. Before I knew it we were off roading it to a small little park 15-20 miles off course. It was pretty amazing to see the ancient petrogylphs etched into the rocks. Of course, all Josie wanted to do was pick up the rocks and carrying them somewhere else despite there being signs everywhere that said not to touch the rocks.

And onto Phoenix

We had a nice but short nice visit with Grandma and Papa. Marty had a radio conference in Scottsdale and Papa and Grandma treated Josie and me to a day at Wild Animal Park outside of Phoenix. It was really cool and even better than a zoo. It seemed that you really got right up close to the animals.

Josie loved the petting zoo part.

That is until the animals starting nibbling on her clothes and her bum.

Riding around in Papa's golf cart

And another frozen yogurt stop

Every morning Josie helped Grandma pick oranges and grapefruit from her tree. The morning we left Josie and Marty stocked up on some tasty citrus. Fortunately, we had eaten all of the oranges but unfortunately, we still had half of the grapefruit still left when we drove through an agricultural check and had to give them the rest of our grapefruit. Marty was seriously heartbroken.

Up next - Car trip to Flagstaff, AZ and the Grand Canyon.