#25 best destination in the world
Mystery Castle
- Built in the 1930s by Boyce Luther Gulley for his daughter
- After learning he had tuberculosis, Gulley moved from Seattle to the Phoenix area and began building the house from found or inexpensive materials
Yayoi Kusama Firefly Infinity Mirror Room
- Mixed media installation with LED lights at the Phoenix Art Museum, known as “You Who Are Getting Obliterated in the Dancing Swarm of Fireflies”
Musical Instrument Museum (Phoenix)
- Largest museum of its type in the world
- The collection has over 15,000 musical instruments from nearly 200 countries and territories
- Opened in 2010
Taliesin West
- Architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s winter home and school in the desert from 1937 until his death in 1959
- Today it is the headquarters of the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation
Montezuma Castle National Monument
- Set of well-preserved dwellings which were built and used by the Sinagua people, a pre-Columbian culture closely related to the Hohokam and other indigenous peoples of the southwestern United States
- Built between approximately 1100 and 1425 AD
- The main structure contains about 45 to 60 rooms and was built over the course of three centuries
- The structure functioned not as a castle, as the name suggests, but more like a prehistoric high rise apartment complex
- Clan members periodically return to these ancestral homes for religious ceremonies
Chapel of the Holy Cross (Sedona)
- Roman Catholic chapel inspired and commissioned by a local rancher and sculptor, who had been inspired in 1932 by the newly constructed Empire State Building to build such a church
- Completed in 1956
Meteor Crater
- Meteorite impact crater, about 3,900 ft in diameter, and about 560 ft deep, surrounded by plains
- The crater has a squared-off outline, believed to be caused by existing regional cracks in the strata at the impact site
Grand Canyon: South Rim
- Steep sided canyon cared by the Colorado River
- The canyon is 277 miles long and up to 18 miles wide, with a depth of over a mile
- Nearly 2 billion years of geological history have been exposed as the Colorado river cut their channels through layer after layer of rock while the Colorado Plateau was uplifted
- For thousands of years, the area was inhabited by Native Americans who built settlements within the canyon and its many caves
- UNESCO World Heritage Site
Horseshoe Bend
- Horseshoe shaped incised meander of the Colorado River
- The land south of the Bend’s parking area, trail, and overlook are on the Navajo Nation territory
Monument Valley
- Region of the Colorado Plateau characterized by a cluster of sandstone buttes
- The valley has been featured in a number of best-known films which defines what viewers think of when they imagine the American West
- The valley lies within the territory of the Navajo Nation Reservation
Costs
Number of Days: 14 days
Best Time To Fly: Dec-Feb, March-May
Airline tickets: $173
Seattle -> Phoenix (round trip) = $173
Food: $45/day x 14 days = $630
Rental car: $51/day x 14 days = $714
Gas: $103
Entertainment: $198
Airbnb: $235/day x 13 days = $3,055
TOTAL: $4,873
