Indian village? Where are you?

Today we thought trying to reach the Indian tribal village via another route. This time, we managed to reach it. However, when we entered the visitors centre, the ranger told me that the village was closed, due to a heavy fire that happened a few days ago. A neighbourhood ranger organisation putted up a controlled fire, which turned out to be not that controlled. The wind shifted, causing a huge part of another district to burn down. The ranger of interest told me they have to wait until heavy rain to see the damage of the fire.

Burning ground down is actually a protection mechanism in this area. Doing so in a controlled way prevents the area to really burn down when an accidental fire occurs.

A little disappointed, we moved on to Roosevelt Dam and Lake Roosevelt. The Dam was huge, and learning about the history of the Dam was really interesting!

Afterwards, we went to Montezuma castle, where we saw the tribal living areas of the Navajo Indians. The houses were almost part of the rock formations. It looked really cool.

After Montezuma, we had some dinner at a nice pasta place: Olive Garden. Then, we went to our hotel in Flagstaff to gain energy for the next day; visiting the Grand Canyon! We are already very much excited! Keep u posted! Cheers!

Gold Diggers

Surprising or not, it was still very hot today. So we went for a little road trip. From our hotel in Phoenix, we drove up to a ghost town named Goldfield. This town used to be a gold mine back in the days. The mines and gold are still there, however the mines have been flooded for a long time now. In the town, they rebuilt the mine, using original materials, to give tourists an idea of what the mines look like and how mine workers worked back in the day. For once, miners had to take a 45 minute elevator ride to go all the way down into the mine! It was a great experience. They used all of the materials they got from the original mine.

After the underground visit, we went off to see lake Roosevelt and tonto national monument. However, the off-road pathway was blocked, so we had to cut our road trip short. Once back at the hotel, our rooms were cleaned and we had gotten some fresh towels. Really nice! We decided to fresh ourselves up, some of us went swimming while others went to get some stuff at the markets. In the evening, we all went to a steak restaurant, where we had some really tasty meat (even I did, while I am usually not eating meat). The portions were huge though! But really tasty! Now we need some time to digest it so we all went to bed. Goodnight! Keep u posted! Cheers!

Oh, we just crossed a desert, that’s all.

Today it was about time to get some rest. We all slept until 9 AM, really tightly in the enormous beds, woke up slowly, and checked out of the hotel.

It was 117 Fahrenheit outside, which is well above 40 degrees Celsius, so doing something outside was not really an option. However, up in the mountains, it was about 20 degrees Celsius cooler, which appeared very tempting to us. So we took the aerial tramway up the mountains of Palm Springs. The view was amazing! The tramway had a rotating platform, such that everyone in the room could enjoy the huge view at least once.

Once up there, we decided to go for a 1.7 mile hike, crossing all kinds of lookouts. We had a lot of fun and the temperature up the mountain was really pleasant. When we were done hiking, we went for lunch. I had some nachos with cheddar, yummy!

Next stop was Joshua tree national park. This national park consists of two different types of desert. These two landscapes bumped into each other many many years ago. Only really adaptive vegetation could survive. Nowadays, you can still see the two types of deserts. The northern part mostly consists of the Joshua trees. It looks like a savannah, with only the trees and further nothing at all. The southern part has a whole different vegetation, and is hotter, more dry, and very rocky. By car, we crossed the entire desert. We drove out of Joshua national park by sunset, which looked really magically. I can’t express how blessed I feel that I am here and that I am able to see all this and write about it.

It was already dark when we had dinner at McDonalds at the side of the highway. We are now driving to our hotel in Phoenix. Keep u posted of our next adventure! Cheers!