So a couple of weeks back, Nat and I take a look at the computer and decide that the best way to deal with Vegas' blast-furnace summer is to get out of town. Fortunately, when you live in one of the hottest places in North America, lots of other places look appealing.
In our case, that place was Sedona, Arizona, a former artist's colony and now Phoenix vacation getaway. Chicago has Door County and the Michigan shore. New York has the Hamptons. Vegas has...well, Vegas has Mesquite, which is two gas stations and a hotel pretending to be a getaway, and we were up for some driving.
We found a resort offering a $99 weekend stay. Whole weekend, under $100. Normally, if you want to stay someplace at those kind of rates, you have to wear one of those bunny suits like they did in Outbreak and hope that you don't find any hair in the sink. But every impression we got of this place, the Los Abrigados Resort and Spa, indicated that they knew what they were doing. It was discounted because one, it was off-season, and two, all we had to do was attend a 90-minute presentation for timeshare opportunities.
Now, as a typical American consumer and resident of Las Vegas, I twitch when I hear the words "timeshare opportunities." What it means is that you're going to sit in a room featuring guys like Alec Baldwin in "Glengarry Glen Ross", and instead of buying something like a car or a home, you're going to be buying the chance to take a vacation in the same place for the rest of your natural lives. This is not a tangible product. No one will hand you keys. You get a deed, yes, but even as an owner, well...the whole concept seemed pretty nebulous to me. Not for nothing was my old hotel's timeshare program referred to as "vacation ownership." "Timeshare" is right there with "Amway" and "Scientology" as simple words that can turn out to be very expensive. They're also code words to friends that you've been snared in some kind of pyramid scheme and will try anything, anything to get out of the pit of snakes you've fallen into.
So we left Friday afternoon on the drive to Arizona looking forward to sleep. That's the great thing about vacationing as parents. We used to go on vacations and look forward to cycling, or food, or copious drinking, what have you-usually all in the same vacation. This trip, we wanted to sleep like coma victims. Combinations of sickness and late nights had led to a situation where we were willing to give 90 minutes of our time for a good night's sleep.
We've taken this drive before, back when we were using free nights at my company's hotel in Scottsdale. One of the things that I liked looking at were the saguaro cactus-those big ones that are about fifteen feet tall and which little kids draw with the tepee when they mean "desert." Apparently, though, they all exist south of Kingman, because I didn't see any along I-40.
I was surprised to see that much grass, that much green. Cattle grazing. A minimum of signs, much less than you would expect to see parallel to the former Route 66, and a lot of very empty highway, which of course means very fast driving. I wasn't; I was the passenger on the way out.
We hit US-17 once we got to Flagstaff and knew we were close. There's more pine trees than you can count, and the temperature dropped down to 70 degrees as the sun disappeared on the other side of them, but the sky remained bright. There's a junction for the next highway we needed to be at, and the directions that the hotel provided were in the opposite direction. We smartly elected the direction going towards town instead of the direction to "nowhere," as both towns would have required a turn in the opposite direction.
We got ourselves to town at about 7:30 and checked in. The first room had a gorgeous view, but the wall near the vanity sink was riddled with ants. While they did not appear to be of the fire variety, I didn't wish to find out. We were able to get a similarly garbed room on the opposite end of the complex-not bad for a busy weekend.
The room was kind of a mini-suite, with a pullout sofa and coffee table, and a balcony overlooking Oak Creek Canyon, which has those big red rocks covered with shrubbery. It was impressive. We elected to head out and walk around.
Sedona looks like the Wisconsin Dells but about 90% less kitschy and less stuff for kids. There's lots of art galleries and New Age-y things there, which I fervently disbelieve. I mean, when the Crystal Castle and the Center for the New Age are right next door to each other, and there's a "Metaphysical" listing on the map, what can you do?
That said, it wasn't over the top. I mean, they were selling the same sorta-Indian stuff you'd see in any store west of Missouri-Kachina dolls, pottery, dream catchers. Even real Indians know this is bullshit; the real Dream Catchers are the IGT slot machines, or as I saw them referred to elsewhere, "Custer's All-Night ATM." But it gives the hippies something to gawk at, the ones convinced they're part Cherokee or something.
We looked at food options, as we'd been on the road since noon. We wound up at Oaxaca, which had all of the decent Mexican restaurant visual points in place-premium tequila, Dos Equis and Carta Blanca on draft, and a waiting list. Granted, there were nothing but white people seated inside, but I figured that was Sedona. We were quickly seated.
SIGN NUMBER ONE YOU ARE IN A BAD MEXICAN RESTAURANT
There were bottles of ketchup and mustard on the table. Every table. No Cholula, no homemade scary-looking salsa bruja. Heinz ketchup and mustard. Oh dear. Name me ONE Mexican dish where you've said, "What this could use is a little ketchup." If you need either of those because you ordered a cheeseburger, the Heinz products are kept in the back, like a crazy relative with Tourette's.
SIGN NUMBER TWO YOU ARE IN A BAD MEXICAN RESTAURANT
They don't have carne asada on the menu. Usually this is a good safe order when you go to an unfamiliar Mexican place; flank steak usually has its own taste and if they spice it right, it can be terrific. It's a decent markup and a moneymaker for the restaurant; flank steak is about a $2 cut of meat. It's hard to overcook and usually comes with soft tortillas, which are also difficult to mess up. This place, however, had ribeye, which isn't much more expensive but struck me as an odd choice.
There was an extensive margarita listing, so I grabbed one that was blue. It wasn't bad. Nat ordered the "pollo fundido," which sounded all right, and I got a chicken chimichanga, a real aura-of-mystery dish when it comes to the sauce.
The food was hideous. Nat's had curry in it. Her dish was free because she refused to eat more than two bites of it. Mine was so unimaginably bland that the ketchup had apparently been used prominently in the sauce. I ate about half of it.
Never again, we said. We found out in the morning that the restaurant's owner was a registered dietitian. Great, we said, Mexican food from people trained to make hospital food. No wonder. We went back to the room and fell asleep.
SATURDAY
One of the nifty prizes that they gave us here was $50 in ILX money. Great, I thought. Typically these things are like funbooks; profoundly worthless unless you plan meticulously. Here, though, the cafe right outside our door took them, same as cash. The caveats: They couldn't make change and couldn't be used for tips. They gave us a twenty and three tens. Breakfast was three muffins and two bottles of orange juice; that was $13, or $3 in actual cash.
We went to Tlaquepaque (pronounced Tuh-LAH-kuh-PAH-kuh), an artist's colony next door to the resort we were there to browse. It's been here a while; filled with trees, it looked more like the giant cement buildings we saw in New Orleans. Nat said it reminded her a lot of Portugal. There were glazed-tile street signs and cobblestone roads. There were lots of old hippies taking pictures of each other by the fountains.
They're here, too; they're behind the counters. The only way most of the salespeople could be any more laid-back, they'd be upside-down. We spent some time in a music-box shop and found out the owner's life story; ran a limousine business in LA for 12 years, then retired here and opened a shop. Sounded like fun. I didn't want to know what his rent was, or his vacation, or the difference in movements in Italian music boxes, but I found out. We got a nice discount.
We saw candles and incense and little twee purses. Lots of knick-knack crap, but some nice contemporary stuff; we found a piece that would fit one very specific area of our house exceptionally well. We saw terrific paintings and more Old West faux Indian crap than you can shake a stick at. I was not allowed to get a wooden box with a skeleton band inside of it, in a Mayan "Day of the Dead" theme. I was also not allowed to get a Roy Lichtenstein-like print that showed a grinning, blond-haired couple in a convertible being pointed by Jesus towards "Las Vegas", as the sign in the other direction said "Heaven"; I thought it would have been perfect for the house. The title of the print was "The Promised Land."
And then, with visions of peace and art and insanely overpriced scarves in our heads, we were off to the timeshare presentation.
That comes next.
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