I drove into Flagstaff on Saturday lunchtime and was quite surprised to see piles of snow on the sidewalks, although it was sunny.

I found a hostel to stay in and then headed out for a walk to explore to downtown area, which is bordered by Route 66 again. I had some lunch and explored the cool little shops and watched the many, many freight trains that come through every few minutes and take a few minutes to actually pass through as they're about a mile long!

In the evening I went up to the Lowell Observatory on the hill, which was great. We got to watch as they opened up the big telescope dome and I got to see the moon close up, Orions nebular, Jupiter and 4 of it's moons, and Mars. I also got to ask loads of questions to this super intelligent girl who worked there about the universe and how the hell she, and the science people in general, knew all this stuff. I think she got annoyed with me after a while...

Next morning I drove down to Sedona, which is a hip little town along the valley. It has a load of spiritual shops and stuff as people believe the town's in a vortex due to the big red mounds that surround it and it's supposed to be magical or something. It was warm, that's all I cared about. I walked round and visited the sights and then drove to Cottonwood, which was pretty pointless. A typical little old town with old antiques shops, just one main street and not much else! So I drove (and drove and drove) to find somewhere to sleep and ended up south of Phoenix! Which was much further than I wanted to drive, but there you go.

It was a short drive the next morning to Tucson, where I got checked into the hostel there too. I took a walk to the visitors centre and was rather surprised that it over 30 degrees as I melted in the heat! I took a drive to the PIMA Air and Space Museum, but all the tours I wanted to do were fully booked for the day, so I drove back and got some groceries.

All the people in the hostel were really nice and we all made dinner together every night, which made a change, and all sat up chatting and drinking beer. The next day we went to the Arizona-Sorona Desert Museum. It's actually more of a wildlife park with trails around the desert. There are huge cactus (cacti?) everywhere, just like in the movies, and ground squirrels and lizards running around. It was another hot day too! That afternoon we went for a long walk around the town.

The next day I got to go on the PIMA tour to the Airplane 'boneyard' which was pretty cool but you couldn't actually get off the coach to see anything up close, but it was still good to see. They have over 4000 planes which are sealed up and are either used for spare parts or are ready for World War 3 or whatever the American's want to instigate next. That afternoon we went to Fourth Avenue, which is the trendy street in Tucson, and we had coffee and in a cool little coffee shop.

On the Thursday morning I had to say goodbye to my car and took her back to Tucson airport. I drove 2224 miles in her, and turned her from silver to orange and white in 3 weeks - not bad!! If you're looking for a new car I can recommend a Mazda 2!

In the afternoon we hired bikes, though I was a little confused as they didn't have brakes, you just had to pedal backwards to stop, which took a while to get used to! Luckily there are a lot of bike paths along the 'river' - which is only a river for 2 months of the year, and a dust bath for the rest of the time - and around the edges of town.

The next day we got the bus - with the bikes - out to the San Xavier Mission Del Bac. It was a rather long ride once we were off the bus, a lot longer than we had thought, and it was hot and there were no pavements, just single desert roads. But we got there eventually, we rode the whole way, and I decided to wait until we were just outside to fall off my bike and graze my knee and bash my other leg with the pedals! Luckily there was a shuttle bus from the Mission back to town...

The Mission was great, a huge place in the middle of the desert. We also had some traditional Indian frybread tacos, which were yummy! We got the bus back to town and got some more groceries.

On Saturday we packed up and got some Mexican for lunch before heading off to the airport to fly to Tacoma, Washington - via Denver - and into the rain and snow. Goodbye sunshine!!!