Southwest USA Roadtrip Honeymoon - Part 1
It’s been on my to-do list forever to add a section for personal/other blog posts to my website, and these photos finally gave me the motivation to do it! Michael (my HUSBAND as of April 8th) and I wanted to do something a little different for our honeymoon, so we started pondering the idea of doing some type of roadtrip throughout the southwestern United States. Neither of us had ever been anywhere in the area (aside from San Diego which we LOVE) and I had been stalking photos from a bunch of places down there and dying to see them!
I was a little hesitant to commit to this plan, because I had always envisioned my honeymoon consisting of us on the laying on the beach somewhere with tropical drinks in hand but I knew Mikey wouldn’t enjoy laying on the beach day after day, and my desire to see the amazing sites of the Southwest won out over the relaxing beach vaca I’d imagined (that will definitely be happening some other time however).
Once we were set on the southwest, I started looking into potential routes and places to see and realized there was no way we could see everything in the two weeks that we had, but we came up with a solid plan that we were both really excited about! Spoiler: we did not stick to this plan exactly, but we came pretty close! I’m splitting up these photos into two blog posts as there are just so many, so I’ll save the details about our little detour to Vegas for the next one.
These photos are from the first half of our trip, where our first stop was Santa Fe, NM. This was an amazing little city with so much character and a bustling art scene – we popped into a ton of neat galleries and we really loved the architecture there. Completely different from anything we see in the northeast! I also apparently was especially fond of the doors as you’ll see below, because I took a ton of photos of different doors!
When we felt like Santa Fe had been properly explored, we headed west towards our next destination; Sedona, AZ. We got sidetracked plenty of times along the way, but we found that on a trip like ours half of the fun is taking everything in as you get from A to B. We found ourselves driving for hours without getting remotely bored because we were blown away by the ever-changing views. The rock formations that surrounded the road were totally different from anything I’d seen before, and a few times we just pulled off onto side roads to drive towards something that really caught our eye - like these rocks below!
The only planned stop we had on this leg of the trip was to see the painted desert and petrified national forest, which was absolutely amazing. The desert really did look like a painting!
When we got close to Sedona I started completely freaking out over the views. I could not get over that people actually LIVE there and get to experience the breathtaking views that you see IN EVERY DIRECTION from the town. The red rocks made me feel like I was literally in another world. To summarize, I LOVE SEDONA. I think I would’ve had a hard time leaving if our next stop wasn’t the Grand Canyon, which lived up to my expectations in every way. We managed to get there a bit before sunset and the light was just incredible. I'll let the rest of these images just speak for themselves, but I hope you've enjoyed this glimpse into our travels! Stay tuned for the second blog post from our trip to see images from Antelope Canyon, Horseshoe Bend, Las Vegas, and Boulder!
