Faye's Visit

Faye is here for the weekend! Her boyfriend is at a training/conference thing in Tempe, so she decided to come out and hang out with me. Last night we had a delicious dinner at Pita Jungle, and today we had an adventure in the desert.

We drove out of Phoenix through Mesa and the Superstition Mountains all the way out to Globe, which is a cute little artsy town. After some shopping and an amazing lunch at Los Robertos, we stopped to hike at Picket Post. I'm not sure what mountains were were in, but they were gorgeous. I do know that we were in the Tonto National Forest, which I think is funny. Because if you look at the pictures, you will see no trees. I'm wondering if maybe Arizonans don't actually know what a forest is?



We stopped along the road to take pictures.


When we arrived at the trailhead, this mountain looked soooo far away. An hour later, we were more than halfway up it. I kept taking pictures as we got closer.

View from the top... (Well, not actually the top. We only had time to go halfway up, which I was okay with, because I knew it was going to be rough going down, and it was. I slipped twice. I seriously need some hiking boots.)

When I see big cactuses (or cacti) like this, it always makes me laugh because my birthmom hates them. She gets all irritated because she feels like they're all flipping her off. This picture is for her.

On the way down, there was a little mishap. Faye got a little cactus stuck on her jeans. She tried to grab one of its needles and pull it out, and it got stuck in her hand.

We tried not to panic, but we didn't know what to do. That cactus was seriously malicious. We were losing daylight, so we finally concluded that we'd just have to finish hiking down the mountain with it sticking out of her hand; that's how well this thing was lodged in there.

Just then, a really cute guy came walking up behind us. He was obviously an experienced hiker and had a backpack full of supplies, including tweezers. He saved Faye! We hiked the rest of the way down the mountain with him, and he was really nice. He was worried about his mototrcycle running out of gas, so as we were leaving, I gave him my name and number and email and told him to call me if he needed help and if he wanted to, he could look me up on Facebook and maybe we could go hiking sometime.

Driving home into the desert sunset was beautiful (I feel like I need more synonyms for that word because so much of what I see is beautiful, but that's a lame word to describe it), and we ended the day with cherry limeades at Sonic. The perfect end to a perfect day.