Mary Bedy Photography

In 2015, my daughter was living in Flagstaff, Arizona and we went there to celebrate Christmas with her. Flagstaff is a beautiful town surrounded by the San Francisco mountain range, and while we were there, we experienced more snow than they had in the Port Huron area of Michigan where we live. Of course the city itself is at about 7,000 feet elevation. During our visit, our daughter took us to a restaurant called Josephine’s in Flagstaff, where for Christmas Eve they had a buffet dinner with no menu service, but five years later we are still talking about that meal. It was easily one of my 10 best meals ever while traveling, or really just ever in general. They had salmon, ham, other meats, about ten difference salads and sides and three or four deserts, including chocolate mousse, that I ate verrryyy slowly to enjoy it as long as possible. I’m not a huge fan of ham, but the ham they had at this buffet was to die for, and I kept going back for more. Anyway, during this visit we

Arches National Park in Utah has a catalog of over 2,000 arches ranging in size from three feet wide to Landscape Arch, which measures 306 feet wide at the base. The park lies on top of a salt bed that came from ocean cover that came and went 300 million years ago, the top layer of which solidified and the weight of the top layer forced the unstable salt layer below to buckle, and arches, trenches, fins and other structures were formed when layers under pressure fell into the shifting base. Arches National Park is part of the Colorado Plateau and is considered high desert. It lies at about 5,500 feet on average above sea level. It’s hot and dry in the summer and there are signs all over the park warning people to watch out for altitude sickness. I visited the park several years ago with my husband and daughter, and we stopped along the road at the very popular and impressive spot called Double Arch with two massive stone arches that you can sit under or walk back through to explo