NAU Parent Weekend

This past weekend, the first weekend in October, was Parent Weekend at Northern Arizona University where my son is attending college. We were looking forward to visiting him, seeing how he is doing, and spending some time with him.

We live on the east coast, and right now the time is three hours later than the time in Arizona. We were leaving on a 7 a.m. flight. It is a one hour drive to the airport, and we aimed to arrive 2 hours early so we could park in a satellite lot, get through security, eat breakfast, etc. That meant we needed to leave our house at 4 a.m., so I got up between 3:00 and 3:30 a.m., which is midnight of the night before, Arizona time! 

We flew for 4-1/2 hours, direct flight, and did our best to sleep some on the way there. We had a nice flight on Southwest Airlines, but upon our arrival it still took an hour to exit the plane (25 minutes), walk to baggage pick-up and get our bags, ride a shuttle to the car rental place and get our car, and get on the road. We were hungry for lunch by this time, 12:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, so we found a subway as soon as we could (1/2 hour) and ate lunch at 10 a.m. Arizona time! An interesting point, we left 82 degrees with 97% humidity and flew to 82 degrees and 37% humidity.

The plane flies in to Phoenix, and the drive to Flagstaff is another two hours, which was next on our agenda. Dry in Arizona, we were already slogging down loads of water! Arriving in Flagstaff at about 12:30 Arizona time to a temperature of about 42 degrees, we were now adding a layer over our T-shirts for warmth. We contacted our son, but he was too busy with homework to see us right away. We needed to check in with the University's Parent Weekend people, so we did that first. Then our Airbnb allowed us to check in early, so we went there and took a nap for a couple of hours. 

Our son was still not available when we wanted to eat dinner, so we went on our own. After we had eaten he was finally available for the evening. NAU had a Casino Night planned, which we all attended, and it was a lot of fun. We all played a little poker (Texas hold'em), but for the most part we all preferred playing Black Jack. The student really cleaned up! But it was not for cash -- it was for raffle tickets for prizes, and we didn't win any of the raffles.

The proceeds of the evening went to scholarship funds for students on the Hotel Management field at the college.

The next day we woke to snow! No big deal -- a couple of inches that melted quickly except for on the mountains.

We invited our son to join us for dinner but he wanted to sleep in. We dined at Denny's, which is a treat for us since our local Denny's went out of business some time ago. Later in the day he did join us for a barbecue hosted by NAU Air Force ROTC. This lunch was followed by a football game, NAU vs. Weber State University, which our student again bowed out of to do more school work. It was an exciting game, filled with turnovers by both teams, and NAU won. I didn't take photos, and the ones I can find on line are protected by copywrite.

We wanted the student to join us for dinner, his choice, and we dined at a steakhouse, Sizzler. I was feeling more like shrimp, which they also had! They had a killer salad bar that came with my meal, with veteran's discount and senior's discount. Very nice!

On Sunday a brunch was planned, but once again our student did not join us, so we dined alone. It showed us yet again that NAU offers the students a huge selection at meals, everything from donuts and muffins to really healthy choices, as well as some very gourmet choices. After our meal our student allowed us to spend some time with him in his dorm. He had been looking forward to some of dad's back scratching time. After a while we went to a movie, at his request - Venom. It's not a movie his dad or I would normally go to, but we didn't mind going to see it with our son since it was the movie he wanted to see. I ate way too much popcorn.

After the movie we offered our son dinner again, but he was again feeling pressure from his assignments, so we took him back to his dorm. We decided to eat dinner at a small local restaurant, and we found a real good one called Salsa Brava. We shared a chimichanga. I highly recommend this restaurant. We especially appreciated their wall honoring the military and their MIA/POW table for the one(s) who won't make it for dinner (kinda like the Air Force's Missing Man formation).

The next morning we again dined at Denny's before beginning our drive back to Phoenix for our 1:30 flight. We made one stop on the way there, and I was happy to get some more photos of Arizona plants. Here are some of those photos:

Barrel cactus:

Cholla cactus:

with a bird's nest found on closer inspection:

And I didn't walk all the way up the hill, but saguaro cactus. Hubby was concerned there might be rattle snakes.

We got to Phoenix, turned in our rental car, rode a shuttle to the airport, checked our bags, went through security, and got to our gate around 12:30. We got ourselves a sandwich, which we shared, since we figured it would be an early dinner when we got back east (5:00 on our body clock, 8:00 EST).

Then they announced the flight was delayed. Two hours. ::sigh::

By the time we actually landed, picked up our bags, rode the shuttle to satellite parking and got underway in our car, it was actually about 11:00 p.m. We had gone from an "early" dinner to being concerned that there would be no restaurants open to get a bit other than fast food restaurants (which we don't like to do, particularly for dinner). Thanks to the G**gle machine, we found a barbecue spot on the way that was open since it was a sports bar and there were people there watching Monday Night Football.

So, midnight found us getting home and eating dinner. What a way to eat an "early" dinner! So we're back. I did not get a menu plan posted. We limped through on some standard quick meals.

How was your week?