Hopi Villages or How We Didn't Go to Phoenix

Michelle and I visited the Hopi villages on First, Second, and Third Mesa. These are all towns within a Hopi reservation in Arizona and they don't allow any pictures. At all. We have enough Kachina dolls and fox pelts, however, to prove we were there.


Joseph and Janice Day, owners of Tsakurshovi are the sweetest people looking to sell stuff to naive tourists ever - but we didn't learn this until the second time we visited them.

Ahem.

On our first occasion in the shop, we were taken off-guard when Joseph berated us a bit for wanting to go to Phoenix. He's quite passionate about the places he feels are really worth seeing on the Colorado Plateau, but we hadn't planned for the 12 week excursion around this relatively small area that he would expect of us. So we felt a little attacked and left the store feeling pretty bummed. But because I can get a bit obsessive, I wasn't ok leaving this negative interaction with an otherwise charming couple hanging out there in the universe. We went back to the shop a couple hours later to explain there may have been a misunderstanding, that we'd like to support their store, and that we'd love for them to tell us where to go in Northern Arizona/ Southern Utah. We left with a detailed map of the area, heavily hand-highlighted by Joseph, and a few hundred dollars worth of desert swag.

This is how we ended up not going south to Phoenix but rather to the road leading us through Las Vegas. (foreshadowing)