#30 best destination in the world

Mystery Castle

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  • 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

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  • 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)

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  • 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

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  • 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

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  • 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)

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  • 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

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  • 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

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  • #7 of the top 25 national parks in the world
  • 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

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  • 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

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  • 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