Day 80 & 81 - Flagstaff, AZ

We've stayed in Flagstaff before, once as a base for seeing the Grand Canyon South Rim and Sedona and then again when Lee organised a surprise 30th birthday trip that involved skiing in the Arizona Snowbowl.

We enjoy staying in the Embassy Suites whilst in Flagstaff as they have a small pool, a hot tub (which is especially good after a day's skiing), suite style rooms with kitchenettes and separate lounge areas, free breakfast with great omelets and best of all, free drinks and snacks between 5pm and 7pm.

Having visited Flagstaff before, we didn't have any pressure on us to see certain sites so we used the 2 nights here to relax and catch up on admin tasks.

We managed to take a trip over to one of our favourite dive bars in Flagstaff, Bun Huggers. It is just across the road from the Embassy Suites an on one side of the building is a burger joint which does really good burgers and on the other, is the bar. It is one of these places where you always seem to meet people and have a good time plus they do really good mudslide cocktails. As has become a tradition in this bar for us, we put some money in the jukebox and turned on some tunes from UK artists. This usually ends up starting conversations and it did again this time, we were actually called ravers by one man. As a 45 year old, Lee was quite chuffed with this. We even managed managed to find the song from our first dance at our wedding. I don't think Lamb has ever been played before in this bar, probably never before in this state.

We were planning on only going to Bun Huggers for dinner and a drink or two but as a result of trying to educate Americans in British music and helped by a couple who were going to a funeral the next day and constantly wanted to buy the whole bar free drinks, we ended up staying until the early hours of the morning. It was a good thing we had decided to use Flagstaff as a place to rest, we needed the lie in the next day!

The next day, whilst Fin was being serviced at a Firestone, we stopped off for a coffee and snack a cool little funky coffee shop. The sandwiches were good but huge, it filled us up for the rest of the day.

With Fin given a full bill of heath, we headed to the Arizona Snowball. Having skied here a few years ago, we wanted to see what it looked like in the summer. We were pleased to see that one of the painfully slow lifts that went all the way to the top of the mountain has been upgraded to a super fast 6 seater. Seeing the lifts and the cafe we sat at between runs brought back great memories and we both said we had to return again in the winter for some more skiing.

It was then time to get some laundry done. Whilst many of the campsites and hotels we stay at have laundry facilities, you can't beat a good launderette with the huge front loader machines which not only get more washing done, they also seem to be a little more gentle with our clothes than the top loaders. The laundry was packed and waiting around was like sitting in a doctors surgery, depressing and boring, so we decided to sneak off back to the hotel for happy hour whilst the clothes were in the drier.

That night, we stayed in the hotel. The bar attender Willie was the same guy running the bar when we came skiing and he kept us entertained with stories and filled us up with free happy hour drinks. We met a lot of cool people in the bar and ended up with a huge list of recommendations of places to visit and see on our trip, we can't wait to tick some of these off.