Diana Tkach

I truly and honestly had a great time in Arizona. I was just there with Don for Christmas up to New Year’s in Sedona, then up to Las Vegas, then down to the Phoenix suburb, Litchfield Park.

My California vacation in August prepared me to see mountains (and that’s one thing I miss, living in Michigan), and that’s exactly what we saw in Arizona: it’s a very mountainous state. The rock formations of Sedona, however, were something totally different and I really enjoyed them. I wish that the town wasn’t so quiet—or maybe I wish that I had more of a drive to want to go exploring. Every time I got out of our freaking Impala, I got static shocked. So I made a plan not to get in and out of the car. Static shock is the one thing I don’t miss about Arizona.

Our big adventure day was the Jeep tour through the Broken Arrow park. It’s where the bulk of my pictures came from. We had glorious weather that day (we drove up 89A, half way to Flagstaff because the scenery was so beautiful)—the day that started out cold and cloudy quickly turned warm and sunny. This was a sunburn alert day.

When we left for Vegas, Sedona got pelted with 14 feet of flooding, and we read in the papers that by the afternoon of the day we left, 89A was closed. Lucky us.

Of course, our side trip to Vegas was perfect as always. We stayed at the Bellagio, which is where I want to retire to one day (love Bellagio). We dined at FIX and I ordered a $70 Kobe steak. Our bill was like 220 something dollars. (I think it was just $30 cheaper than Little Palm Island for AJ’s birthday!) The weather didn’t cooperate and it rained all day, but the water show went on anyway, and I’m glad it did. I would totally (and I’ve said this a million times) go back just to see that water show.

The drive to Litchfield Park was memorable. We passed tons of cactus patches—you know, the ones you always think of when you think of Arizona… We stayed at the Wigwam Resort and Spa in their Whitwell Suite overlooking the pool. I remember having a spa day with a massage and pedicure. Oh, and they drove you around in golf carts!

I still tell the story of the Arizona Kitchen (their 5-diamond restaurant) and how we got a $100 meal for free because our room wasn’t ready at 6pm because the previous guests liked it so much that they wanted to stay longer. And also, how it was the best filet minion I’ve had (it was served on a scalloped potato soufflé with sautéed mushrooms!) and how Don tried to abscond with the chocolate cactus to eat in the room later, only to drop it in the lobby of the hotel.

I was glad to be home, mind you. I told Don we weren’t taking any 2005 vacations (I’ve already got two lined up). I found out that I hate sitting coach, and that I hate flying for more than 3 hours.

I won’t have a desperate need to go back to Arizona, but I’ll have some happy memories in the back of my mind.

There’s not much going on in Nevada other than Las Vegas and a while lot of gambling. I visited Vegas twice last year, and am trying to put together a trip for me and AJ for our birthday celebration.

The fist Vegas trip was a day trip. Don and I drove four hours from California’s Rancho Mirage. The consierge gave us some shit photocopied map that didn’t have a lot of roads labeled, so I was in a pretty bad mood the entire four hours there and the four hours back (I like to know where I’m going). Everytime we made it to a city that was listed on the map (and I don’t think that stupid thing was even to scale), I got just a little more thankful that I didn’t have to drive.

When we crossed the border into Nevada, the first thing we saw was this gambling mirage. It’s the first thing we saw past the Hoover Dam, too. This cross-over was the moment I realized there were going to be a lot of slot machines in my future.

Driving to Vegas is a very unique experience if you’re coming from California. I believe it was I15 we were on (after driving around aimlessly through the Mojave Desert for several hours) when we started seeing signs for Vegas. Then I thought I saw a city approaching.

I thought it was going to be cooler. My moms described it as this strip in the middle of nowhere, but I was staring at it for 30 minutes before we were able to exit the expressway. I wanted it to be more spectacular. Coming from Arizona was total shit because you have to drive through the suburbs (basically from the Hoover Dam to the Strip). By the time we finally got to the Bellagio, it was raining, the traffic was seriously crappy, and driving through the slums of Las Vegas totally turned me off.

During our day trip, we parked over at Caeser’s Palace. The one thing I’ll never forget is how painfully smokey it was in that casino. Just as we were leaving, I played $40 in a quarter slot and nearly hacked my lungs out. The day trip also brought me to the Bellagio, and the realization that I would have to come back again one day. I spent $20 on dollar slots because Don saw his lucky number. I lost all $20 on just a few spins.

We left the day trip Vegas in just four hours because Don didn’t like the clinging of the slot machines. I didn’t think there would even be a second trip to the Vegas and to my surprise, it was Don who suggested a side trip to Vegas from Arizona.

The Bellagio trip came at the ass-end of December 2004. We stayed in Sedona (a beautiful town) and then visited the Grand Canyon before hitailing it over to the Strip. When we finally arrived in Vegas, we got the weather reports that Sedona and that entire area was getting pelted with rain and in two days the water levels reached 14 feet.

We had dinner at FIX that evening and walked around the shops at Bellagio. The fountains made my entire trip, and reaffirm my love for the Bellagio. The next morning I taught Don how to play video poker (I gambled four hours the night we got there) while we were waiting for the Buffet to open. The brunch (champagne for me, please) was really amazing, and I will never forget how delectible their pumpkin cheesecake was (AJ, remember this).

After we checked out of the Bellagio, we headed over to the Vosges Haut Chocolat boutique at Caesar’s Forum Shops, only to have them get the key stuck in the door and lock themselves out. It was so hilarious that I had to blog about it. There are pictures in the December 2004 archives.

The Vegas trip ended on a sour note when Don found out how much I spent on chocolates, but I am not deterred. Now I’ve just got to find a way to get AJ down there. It would be nice to see the rest of the strip!

I finally made it to California last year and boy am I in love. I’m seriously considering buying a time share over in Rancho Mirage, it was beautiful!

Some memories:

The first thing that happened was Alamo charged me $100 over the price of my rental car because I had requested a convertible but decided to switch to the Impala because of the Miami incident (broke a windshield in the Keys). Then Don made me drive us to the villa, even though this was my first time zone change, my first time seeing mountains, and my first time driving in California (carpool lanes be damned).

The reason I don’t like to drive with Don in a new region is because I’m an anal driver. It’s not that I do the speed limit or read every sign, but I love to know exactly where I’m going, how far it is, and I need to be constantly updated. AJ can attest to this, every time we saw a sign for a new Key, I made him update me on how many miles to Key West. That was a long drive. But Don went to sleep. I remember being horrified because he didn’t even want to help me got to the freaking expressway before zonking out. It was a fiasco and we finally stopped in Cabazon to not only eat, but change drivers.

A few days later (Monday) we made the trip to Newport Beach, and it was the first time I’d seen the Pacific Ocean. After two hours in the ocean, I prompty was sun poisioned and spent the next day in bed, recovering.

The day after that (Wednesday), Don took me on a four hour drive through the Mojave Desert to the jem of the valley: Las Vegas. We were there about five minutes before Don started complaining about how he hated Vegas. He’s been there before, and just took me so that I could experience it. We were in Vegas for four hours before turning back. On the way back to Rancho Mirage, Don proposed to me in the middle of the Mojave, at a fork in the road named Kelso, while the sun was setting.

That night I was so sun poisioned that I called the Emergency Room at the hospital I work at back in Michigan. It was midnight in CA, 3am in MI. When I asked Don to go find me some Benadryl, he told me he was reading and to leave him alone.

By Friday, I had a mask of dead skin on my face (literally ten layers of dermis). Don and I embarked on our last day trip through the San Bernadino Mountains and down to San Diego to visit the zoo. I remember putting on so much SPF on my dermis masque that the dead skin clinging on to my face looked painred white, but I did it in the name of combating UV rays. The zoo was amazing and we had lunch at the 4-star restaurant that was situated up in the trees! It was beautiful even if my face looked gross.

Driving through the mountains is something I’ll never forget… Those roads that go back and forth up the mountain are really real—and that scared me! Look at my August archives to see pictures from this harrowing journey.

By Saturday, the day we were going home, my chest and shoulders were blistering, and I had spent the better half of Friday evening picking the dead dermis masque off my face. It was a painful trip home, but leaving California just makes me want to go back there again.