After an action packed twelve days with the kids and with family, we decided to take a few more days of downtime to catch up on stuff and ease into our time in Sedona.
We decided to treat ourselves to a massage and even booked it before we arrived! We won’t share the establishment name here, but we think we may have been a touch hasty in our booking. More on that in a moment.
Since we did not have a lot planned for our first day, other than grocery shopping (about 1.5 miles away, extremely convenient!) and checking out the Sedona Uptown area, we decided to have Pancake Day!
Why is Pancake Day capitalized, you ask?
When we are off the road and at home base in Florida, Pancake Day is usually a Sunday thing, once or twice a month (ok fine, every weekend), where we make Ann’s famous pancakes for breakfast, and then we usually skip lunch and have a light dinner.
Pancake Day is typically not a major physical project day for us. It is an ass-ton of carbs hitting us first thing in the morning, and we spend the rest of the day trying to burn it off while feeling pretty sluggish. Mind you, we still get a lot done, we just have to do it with a wad of pancake in our tummies and guilt working their way through our system.
And we regret nothing! We very much look forward to Pancake Day. It’s about the only big carb cheat we do with food anymore, so we are doing it while we can!
Since we are on a road trip, Pancake Day has had to be flexible.
If we are driving that day? Noooooo waaaaaaaay can Pancake Day be on a driving day. It would be a serious drag on our attention and reaction time. When those carbs wear off, there is usually a nap involved. Not ideal while driving.
If we are planning to hike that day? Nope. Not going to burp bacon and pancakes all the way down a trail with bears around. We would be delicious. Plus, it would feel like hiking with lead legs, while we’re processing the carbs.
So, there have not been any Pancake Days on this trip so far!
That changes today, our first full day in Sedona. The first of six days, actually, so we are not feeling pressured at all!
Our plan for the day was simple:
- Sleep In
- Pancake Day
- Walmart
- Check out the Sedona Uptown Area (Kind of the heart of the city)
- Massage (90 minutes baby)
- Low key afternoon
How did we do, you ask?
Sleep In: Yep! As late as we could anyway. Medicine alarms go off at 6:45 so anything after that is considered sleeping in.
Pancake Day: Oh yes. It was a good Pancake Day. They all are.
Walmart: So convenient. Easy in and an out and Dude! They had the cane sugar Coke in the America 250 bottles! Heck yeah, we bought them out (four whole six-packs)
Check out Sedona uptown: We did indeed get a chance to go and check out the Sedona uptown area. It was only about 20 miles from our campground, so we hopped into the F250 and headed up the road. It was pretty crowded and very tourist trap-ish for the most part, so everything was very jammed together, but we were able to find a place to cram that big ass truck into a parking spot, and go check out a couple of neat galleries and art stuff, we found our Sedona swag for the airstream and for friends, so we were all set!
Time to head to the massage!
Massage:
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We did not do great with the massage
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We were very much looking forward to the massages! 90 minutes, couples massage, feet and back.
It started out fine.
It was a dark room. We were led there by two little old ladies that didn’t speak much English. It was very quiet other than the priiiiiiing praaaaaaaang proooooooooonnnnng music that was playing in the background.
Oh, and the commercial restaurant dishwasher running its cycle.
A few minutes earlier, when we had arrived at the massage place address, we quickly saw it, nestled snugly amongst a number of other businesses in a crowded strip mall with limited parking lots of tourists driving about, and a weird McDonalds with the weird blue arches sharing a parking lot. So, out of an act of self-preservation, we made a beeline for the place just to get out of the traffic. We never really paid attention to what was operating on ether side of the massage place’s door.
It turns out that the massage place was pressed tight up against the back of the fairly busy Mexican restaurant, and our little room of peace and solitude and mindfulness was structurally part of the Hobart dishwasher operating at full capacity exactly one 1/2 inch sheet of drywall away from our heads. Since we both worked in a high volume kitchen when we first started dating, way back when we were 17, we knew exactly what a Hobart sounds like, we know how those dish trays are loaded to the brim, and we know what the dish trays sound like when they are being loaded and unloaded. And it is not a particularly delicate task. Nor is it peaceful, solitude-y, or mindful. But, the massage folks must have noticed this neighborly noise nuisance at some point, so they had the priiiinnnnng praaaaaaaannnng prooonnnnnnnng turned up pretty loud, and as a result, we mostly ignored the dishwashing going on.
The massage itself started pretty much as we expected it to. The massage ladies stuck our feet in a footbath to get them dogs soaking, did weird random stuff to the head and scalp and face to burn some time while the stinky feet are soaking. They moved to the shoulders and neck a bit (ok ow, that was a little harder than I expected, but let’s see how it progresses) and then back to the face and then the arms. They did the standard arm stuff and all the one rep stretches to bend the wrist around little and then here comes the individual finger pulling (on no, don’t pull that one too hard! 😉)
Hand gestures are made instructing us to roll over, at least that’s how the gestures were interpreted. We heard the subtle dripping, shuffling, scuffling and crinkling that comes from moving the footbath and setting up the massage table end.
Here is where things got interesting.
Once we were comfortable on our stomachs with our heads nestled into the little face hole lined with a toilet paper seat cover, they started working on us for real. From a position of much higher leverage apparently.
It escalated so quickly, we could barely breath, let alone raise a hand to say, “grrrrppp, a little lighter please?”
These women had incredible hand strength and elbow strength and knee strength and heel strength. They knew exactly where to apply the most pressure to just smash the trapped tension to pieces. In our minds, as we later discussed, we figured we knew we had a lot of stuff built up, so maybe it’s going to hurt a bit more than usual. So, neither of us ever said, “hey, dial it down a little back there, man-hands!”
So it is 100% our fault that we walked out of there, significantly tenderized, feeling like it was pretty good massage, but also mostly pretty bad, and that we might be sore for a few days.
As to the low key afternoon part of our agenda, the decision was made for us by two sadistic, and shockingly strong, little old massage ladies. Low key it was.
Later that evening, as we discussed the plans for the next day, we decided that it would be a drive around day, no hikes. Too sore!
But, it was still a good Pancake Day!
TaterTotTales 