Sedona Sightings

I write to you today from Sedona, Arizona. The Red Rocks are famous so we decided to pass through on our way from Santa Fe to La Jolla, where we will be celebrating Lucas’s graduation from UCSD.
Maybe all of you know this already but I finally found the answer to a riddle that has teased me for decades: Why do we have four time zones (Eastern, Central, Mountain and Pacific) but only three times? It’s because in Sedona and, presumably, the rest of the Mountain Time Zone they don’t change their clocks! Sometimes (like now) they’re on Pacific Time and sometimes on Central time. How cool is that? None of that annoying changing of all those timepieces. I love anything that refuses to conform.
The famous red rocks line the canyon roads along the last 17 miles or so on the approach to Sedona. They look more like sugar sculptures colored by iodine than cooled molten ore. The formations appear to have been dripped from the sky, leaving peaks and vertical towers resembling New York’s skyline as if viewed through a kaleidoscope.
We’re staying at a place called L’Auberge de Sedona, in a cabin set amid lush and varied vegetation. We dined last night al fresco by a creek. I wish I could eat every meal for the rest of my life in the open air.
The sun rises here at 4:30 AM (due to the not changing the time thing), which gives the locals a head start. Many of them use the time for journaling, or yoga, and I’m thinking maybe herein lies the answer to finding that extra time we all wish we had!
Of course we brought Daisy, our Jack Russell terrier, along for the ride. She sat under the table last night mesmerized by the life on the creek. The hotel had a dog bed and bowl waiting, along with a picnic basket filled with biscuits and a roll of those little blue plastic bags. It seems like yesterday that instead of Daisy, it was Lucas and Olivia the hotels were fussing over with their names in sponge letters lined up on the bathtub ledge or an invitation to the hotel’s Kid’s Club. We took them everywhere, too…and now they embark on a journey of their own. Sigh.