Look, it DOES snow in the desert

It began to rain like crazy in Red Rocks; we found out from the rangers that it was going to snow over night. On Friday night, we saw a brake in the weather. As fast as we could, we broke down the camp, packed up the car, and drove south to beat the storm...but what we ended up doing was driving into a snow storm in Arizona. Brilliant. Thanks to our iPhones, we got a reservation at a Quality Inn before it started to snow too bad. We did not know it was going to snow as bad as it ended up snowing, so we thought we would be safe. But alas, we were not. We hit snow at Kingsman, AZ which is about 80 from Flagstaff. As we drove, the snow kept coming. I (James) drove the whole time to get to Flagstaff. I was convinced that I could make it. We did make it, but going only 35mph (and damn that is slow!), it took us about two hours to drive 80 miles. While driving on the highway, we only saw one snowplow in that 80 miles.

When we arrived at the hotel at 3am, we were "welcomed" be the night manager. We fanticized that he would say something like "Thank goodness you got here - what horribe weather!" or "We almost sent out the search party. We were so worried!" But no, what we got was "Sign here" and the answer to our late check out request at 1pm was "So that means out at 1pm not dilly dallying and out by 1:15pm, correct?" What a dick. Go drive in the snow. We retired to our room, watched a B horror movie, and fell to sleep.

The next day (well, technically it was the same day) we woke up to the sound of screaming children running up and down the halls. Lovely. The manager on duity called us and requested that we move our car so they could plow. We walked outside and found our car and bikes completely covered in snow! The plow man told us that many guests had taken pictures by our snow covered car in the morning (because of the bikes - see picture).