Thursday, January 10, 2013

The Many Faces of Arizona Winter: Part 2

On Christmas Eve Eve, Bill and I went to Kingman to visit his dad and grandma. On our way out of town, we saw some hot air balloons with this beautiful sunset as a backdrop:


The next day, we left Kingman for Winslow. We decided to try to go to the Grand Canyon since I hadn't made it there on my trip with Angel and Isabel. When we hit Williams, we were in snow. After about fifteen minutes on the highway toward the Grand Canyon, we ran into an accident that had the highway blocked. We were determined to try and make it to the Grand Canyon, so we decided to try and find a road that was a shortcut between the highway we were on and the other highway that we could take toward the Grand Canyon.

This is what we found. The snow was pouring down and the only path was a deserted, muddy, and icy dirt road through the forest. We admitted defeat...for now...
As we continued on the drive between Williams and Flagstaff, the road conditions only got worse and the snowfall was relentless. This is my view out the passenger window.
And this is my view a little later in the trip.

             
This is some video I took on our drive. The smacking sound you hear the windshield wipers making  about halfway through the video are from them hitting ice that has built up on the windshield. At one point, Bill and I were rolling down our windows and pulling off chunks of ice while we were driving to keep the windshield wipers working.

The ice that built up on the headlights and front bumper.
Melting water from the windshield that re-froze while we were driving.

After we passed flagstaff, the snow disappeared and we had a normal drive the rest of the way to Winslow and back home. The next day, Christmas, we went to my aunt's house. Here are some random pictures from the day:

Bill as Napoleon in his paper "popper" crown.
Do you like my festive necklace? It lights up :)

Dad and Michael discussing the jokes from the poppers.
Mom modeling her poinsettia hair clip.
Aunt Debbie, Aunt Jeannie, and Dick enjoying their stocking stuffers.

  The whole group. We're holding up the gifts that my cousin made for us for a picture since he doesn't live in state. Yes, that is a giant bow on my head lol.

On New Year's Day, Bill and I went on a drive to find cool sunset pictures, and we found them :) .







Yes, it really looked like this. I didn't do any photo editing on these.



















Below are some panorama shots I stitched together:

This is the beginning of the sunset. You can see a small glimmer of red light beginning to break through the clouds in the middle. Bill and I were ready to give up at this point. We thought the sunset was being blocked by the clouds and started to turn around and head back to the car.

We turned around after a couple of minutes and this is what we saw.

This is the sunset a few minutes later.


The view of the sunset from the same perspective as the first panorama shot.

If you missed The Many Faces of Arizona Winter: Part 1, you can read it here.

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