We went to Flagstaff to enjoy some more healthy outdoors living and to see some natural wonders. With that in mind we rented a car through an English company so that we could drive ourselves to the Grand Canyon the next morning. Although we saved money by renting through an English company we didn't actually get a car! So on the one sunny day we had in Flagstaff we spent about 2 hours on the phone to Trudy's mam in a three way conversation with customer service! In the end we went for a walk in the woods around Flagstaff - still lovely.

When we finally managed to rent an actual car we drove to the Grand Canyon and saw it in all it's ridiculously massive glory (although Tom believes that the bottom of the Canyon could definitely do with a few multi-storey car parks). However, after about an hour the entire Grand Canyon National Park was plunged into the worst snowstorm of all time (probably not an exaggeration). Visibility was reduced to about 15 feet, so basically the weather forced us to leave! On the way out of the park a herd of moosey-type creatures wandered over the road in front of our car. Trudy tried to take a lovely photo but Tom was busy working the windscreen wipers - Trudy's best photo was ruined!

We drove to Sedona Valley where there are lots of enormous red rocks sticking out of the ground (in fact the very opposite of the Grand Canyon). The rocks all have different names depending on their shape, see if you can spot them from our photos: Snoopy, Bell, Cathedral, The Coffee Pot, Dave, The Internet, Gravel, Marmite, Ham, A Man Fashioning A Cayak Out Of A Log... We climbed up to the saddle of Cathedral Rock which made Trudy feel like "one of them animals that scrabble up the side of mountains and look like goats" (Tom: "they're called mountain goats Trudy"). During the descent from Cathedral Rock we both suffered from the little known condition Red Rock Fever which saw Trudy throwing her woolly hat onto the floor as hard as she possibly could (resulting in the unimpressive noise of a woolly hat hitting the floor at great speed i.e. silence). Tom could be seen swinging our lunch bag around his head ready to launch it off a cliff and frothing at the mouth. Oh dear.

In the Flagstaff hostel Trudy found the back of her earring in her hair. Incredibly it had been MIA since Tucson, about 4 days previous. We may start using Trudy's hair (nest) to hide our passports and money! No one will look there, or will they? Tom's hair can be used to safely store shredded reciepts...

We wanted to eat cactus before we left Flagstaff; we found out that cactus tastes like green beans (which aren't that great anyway) and also covers everything it touches with a bitter slime, thus ruining the entire meal. On the plus side we didn't get spiked...