Do these rocks ring a bell?

Dear Husband and I took one day to drive exactly 2 hours north of Phoenix to visit an old friend from Illinois. DH used to accompany her husband's choir(s) and even visited them for a week after they moved down there and I was busy with medical school rotations. They had a couple concerts, did some local hiking, and visited the Grand Canyon.

The husband has since passed, so this time we picked up lunch at a local cafe for the three of us, and then she dropped us off to hike around Bell Rock and Courthouse Rock so she could keep packing to move to Dallas with one of their kids. (Her landlord has decided to sell the house where the landlord is currently living and move into our friend's little house; she says the housing market in Sedona is worse than the one in Pittsburgh due to its proximity to California.)  

The weather forecast called for rain or even snow, so we borrowed jackets from our hostess and set out on an easy hike circumnavigating the two large rocks.

There were some other hikers out, especially between the two parking lots; on the far side of the buttes we could walk for many minutes without seeing someone else. We enjoyed the colors and shapes of the rocks, including the white stripes in the picture at the top, which reminded me of Where's Waldo's? socks. This green and purple prickly pear cactus looked pretty. And we found a clutch of baby saguaro cacti under a mesquite tree (below), just like at the Desert Botanical Garden. It will be decades before they grow large enough for their root systems to steal all the water and kill the tree that sheltered them, however.

This was a particularly large and prickly agave plant. To stay on schedule, we decided not to climb any of the rock formations, which DH thinks he did back during his first visit, as he recognized some of the terrain. There was no inclement weather, and in fact the sun came out toward the end of the hike. Our hostess picked us up so we could have brownies a la mode with crème de menthe before we hit the road. Back in Phoenix we spent an extra hour in the car to drive back to the Air BnB in order to heat up leftovers for dinner so we wouldn't have to a) buy something else and b) throw away $20's worth of food. 

We made it back to the Musical Instrument Museum in time for a beautiful classical guitar concert. Attendance was light, so we basically had our own private box above the main floor to watch and listen to Miloš. The day was everything I had hoped it would be.

This was us at the rest stop on our way up to Sedona.