Today’s drive was the shortest yet, just 320 miles. There were a few anxious moments near the end however. With about 10 miles left to go, I noticed the pressure reading on the left rear tire starting to drop (our car shows the pressure of all four tires on the dashboard). When it got down to 6 psi below the other three tires I knew something was wrong. I got off on the first of the populated exits for Flagstaff and went directly to a tire repair shop. When I got out and looked at the tire I could plainly see a screw embedded in the sidewall. As I suspected, the repair shop could not do the normal patch job with the screw stuck in the side of the tire. Worse, they did not have a new tire of the correct size. I called around to other nearby tire shops quickly as the air was leaking out. Finally found one that had the tire I needed just 2 miles away. It was almost flat when I got there, but the small mom and pop shop was very accommodating and took my car right in. I had a new tire mounted on the car in 20 minutes! They were great.

Since I had left early that morning and passed into the Pacific time zone (another extra hour in the day) it was only a little after noon time here once the tire was fixed. I ate some lunch and decided to take a tour of Walnut Canyon, shown in the featured picture for this post and just on the outskirts of Flagstaff. The canyon is a national park and had a nice walking trail you could follow down into the canyon.

This canyon is unique in that a people called the Sinagua once lived in the canyon on ledges along the cliff faces. Limestone “roofs” overhung these ledges allowing them to build small houses in the naturally formed alcoves. The inhabitants were there for roughly 150 years from 1100 – 1250.