Devotional Day Trip (with salt and pepper)

On our last devotional day to Dionysos, we took a day trip up north.  I had been feeling an itch to get out of the city, so we decided to go to the Tonto Natural Bridge.  My husband had been there before but I had not.  

We woke up later in the morning than we intended, but started up anyway.  The day was beautiful, and we took a different route than usual, which was actually even more scenic than I thought it would be.   We were delighted to see patches of snow still on the ground the farther north we got.  (Snow delights me when it's non-threatening in this way.)

On the way there we were waylaid by a mutual weakness, one that has cut hours out of many a road trip that we have taken...  

Antique store!

Here you can see our favorite find of the day that made the detour worth it.  They are salt and pepper shakers in the shape of and decorated with fly agaric mushrooms (although yellow instead of the traditional red):

My husband had tried to describe the land bridge to me, but it's understandably hard to describe.  Needless to say, it exceeded my expectations.   The drive there takes you steeply down into a canyon, and you can't see the bridge until you hike a little bit, and then suddenly it's THERE.  Much bigger than I anticipated - it looks like a huge cave at first, until you're in front of it and close enough to see through the other side.  Water trickles down steadily from the top down into the creek that cuts through it, down onto bright blue water and green moss.  On the interior walls underneath it, there's small ledges and caves.  We imagined what it might be like, being one of the first people to stumble upon and discover it in the late 1800's!

(The first pic is from the outside, the second from under the bridge looking out towards the other side.)

We did the full hike down into the bridge, through it, and went up the ravine on the opposite side.  Although it wasn't long, it was a very rocky hike, sometimes necessitating using your hands to climb and balance.  This was the first strenuous hike I've done since breaking my foot last year, and although I had some achey metatarsals towards the end, I held up pretty well.

Our waking up late and getting distracted by knick knacks meant that we only had a couple hours to spend there.  Which means we'll have to make another trip back soon!

Since the park closed we couldn't picnic there like we planned, so we drove further north trying to find an out of the way place in the forested area where we could stop.  We had to settle for a place just a little off the road.  There was plenty of snow on the ground and with the temperature dropping with the sunset, we settled on having a car picnic in the backseat.  It was a lovely feast with homemade bread, olive tapenade, falafel and hummus, oranges and wine.  Most of the wine was poured out onto the damp earth at the foot of the largest pine tree nearby.  While looking into the trees, we saw what looked like a wolf (but was more likely a large coyote with a healthy winter coat) loping through the trees surprisingly close by!

I'm very much looking forward to the warmer weather allowing us to go camping again - I've missed it.