Hey, just so you know ... this post is now about 6 years old. Please keep that in mind as it very well may contain broken links and/or outdated information.

Wake up, time to hike! We woke up at 6:00am, grabbed a quick breakfast of snacks at the hotel, and headed over to the Echo Canyon Trail parking lot at Camelback Mountain for our annual hike. By 7:00am we had started up the 1.33 mile (1,300 feet in elevation) trail to the summit. It was a beautiful morning for hiking (chilly in the shade) and we made it to the top around 8:20am. After about 30 minutes taking in the spectacular views of the valley, we started back down and reached the parking lot by 10:00am. Hiking works up an appetite so we stopped at the Black Bear Diner (which we weren’t able to do over in Goodyear on Saturday) for breakfast.

Back at the hotel we all cleaned up and tried to figure out what to do for the rest of the day before my sister’s late-afternoon flight home. We decided to check out the Phoenix Zoo. It was another beautiful, slightly chilly day in the valley (quite the contrast to almost melting during my last trip to this zoo back in June 2000!). While I didn’t recognize a lot of the zoo (lots of changes in 18 years) I did remember the meandering, looping trails that made it hard to remember where you’ve been and what you still need to see. There’s also a separate Dinosaurs in the Desert exhibit that we didn’t bother to pay for, but it was cool to walk around close to that area and suddenly have a John Williams-esque soundtrack jump out at us from hidden speakers (“the raptors are in the building!”).

Leaving the zoo we continued a new spring training tradition: In-n-Out Burger. My daughter is a vegetarian so she got a grilled cheese, but my sister and I went for double-doubles. Mmmmm … cheeseburgers and fries. Once back at the hotel my daughter and I prepped for our last baseball game while my sister packed to fly home. After dropping my sister off at Sky Harbor for her flight back to Seattle, my daughter and I drove downtown to Chase Field to see an exhibition game (not spring training!) between the Cleveland Indians and Arizona Diamondbacks. The roof of the stadium was open, we had second row seats near the Indians’ dugout, and it was another perfect night for baseball. Unfortunately, my sister must have been our good luck charm because in front of 16,392 attendees, the Indians got soundly trounced by the D-Backs 0-7, our only loss of the trip. 🙁

That’s the end of vacation … tomorrow we fly home.