Sarah and I recently made a pact to improve our relationship. Every month, we're going to go on a mini road trip to somewhere we've never been or haven't been to in a long time. Last month, we went to Prescott, AZ and had a fantastic time. While there, we met a great guy named Charles Morgan, former Deputy Sheriff, current volunteer at the Sharlot Hall Museum right near the center of town. He even sent us these beautiful Canadian slate coasters for our living room. If you get the chance to go visit Prescott, be sure to visit the museum on a weekend and tell him we said hi.

Anyway, this month's trip was to Cottonwood, AZ to ride on the Verde Canyon Railroad. It was an absolutely beautiful train ride along the Verde River. It's four hours long and if you go at the right time, the weather is just absolutely gorgeous. Since there was so much rain this year and it's been unseasonably warm lately, the leaves hadn't quite changed color, but there were some areas, as you'll see in the photos, that had begun to turn. The trip was, again, quite beautiful and we'd highly recommend you make the trip.

Below, you'll find two sections for photographs: a bunch of thumbnails and a list of photos. The thumbnails are some of my favorites (of the 240 I took) and the others were notable mentions. If you're interested in getting full-resolution copies of any of the photos, feel free to send me an e-mail. Please note that almost all of the photos were taking with our new camera while we were traveling along at approximately 10 miles per hour. This camera did a wonderful job and we are so impressed with its performance. Lots of the landscape shots were taken with the polarizing filter in the "Landscape" mode. Some of them have been slightly tweaked for better color using the "enhance" button in iPhoto.

• The train itself
• Inside the train
• Smelting factory
• Slag from the smelting factory... no not that kind of slag. This slag is 40 feet tall and is made of the waste from the smelters.
• Riding through the slag... Every year, one foot of slag would be deposited in the big heap seen in the last picture. The 40 feet of slag was accumulated over the 40 years the factory was in business.
• Beautiful Arizona landscape
• Very Verde valley
• The train rounding a bend
• A crescent turn in the canyon. This reminded me of the "Canyon of the Crescent Moon" from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
• More Arizona landscape
• Some Sedona-red rock
• Beautiful blue sky
• Sarah with the canyon
• Some of the slow-running water in the river
• Cottonwood trees. Cottonwoods only grow near rivers or bodies of water. I forget why, but I remember learning that in a geography class at ASU.
• A river runs through it
• Nice canyon shot
• A rock in the wilderness
• The sun peeking in
• Red rock wall
• More red rock
• Canyon landscape
• Some trees showing their new colors
• Sarah surveying beautiful Perkinsville
• An old metal roof

Stay tuned for my review of the trip. There's a lot of interesting stuff to say about it. Hopefully, you'll be able to make it up there yourself. And for all you techies out there, never export your photo galleries directly from iPhoto. Always use Photoshop as you can compress the images properly and save yourself a lot of disk space!