Posts Tagged With: Flagstaff Arboretum

Flagstaff, AZ June 10

On Monday afternoon we arrived at Flagstaff, Arizona, the home of Chris’ brother Lucien, his wife Joyce and their Pembroke Welsh Corgi, Manning. This is the first road trip since the pandemic and it was so wonderful to visit family in person. Joyce had retired several years ago and Lou last year. Last year they permanently moved from Scottsdale to Flagstaff. They had purchased property in Flag in 1999 and had the house built in 2010-2011. We have been down here several times and enjoy the area. Flagstaff was named in honor of a ponderosa pine flagpole used to raise the U.S. flag for the national centennial ceremony held July 4, 1876.

Monday Lou demonstrated the wonders of an Ooni oven with his homemade pizza. The oven heats up to 850-920 degrees F in 30 minutes. The oven was originally designed by a Finnish person who moved to Scotland where Ooni is now home based. The oven is able to be wood fired or gas fired.

Over the years, Lou has become interested in astronomy. After researching several telescopes, he had an observatory built on their property with a retractable roof; it houses a Astro-Tech refractor telescope with a 6” diameter lens. Monday and Tuesday nights, we spent looking up at the sky and learning about several celestial objects, including open clusters, globular clusters, galaxies and binary stars.

Lucien and Joyce are very involved with the Epiphany Episcopal Church in Flagstaff. In 1912, Epiphany Church moved from temporary quarters to its current rock Mission style church. Wednesday afternoon we got a tour of this church that is on the National Historic Register.

Thursday we went to the Flagstaff Arboretum; it is included in the largest tract of ponderosa pine forest in the world. We took the trails around the various gardens at the Arboretum, with the ponderosa pines and the San Francisco Peaks always a presence.

Our morning visit there was followed by lunch at a Flagstaff restaurant new to us, the Tourist Home. The Tourist Home was built in the 1920’s by Basque sheep herders who would graze their flocks in the area during the warm summer months. It was a boarding house of sorts and they built the handball court off of the what is now the restaurant patio. The Tourist Home was rebuilt in 2014 to become a restaurant.

After lunch we came back to help Lou and Joyce with some yard work and got a surprise visit from some horses and humans who had lost their trail.

Tomorrow morning we head back home via stops in Utah, Wyoming, Montana and North Dakota.

Chris Klejbuk, Ed Heimel Flagstaff AZ June 10, 2021