This morning you’ll get a true bird’s-eye view of one of the West’s most famous landmarks, the Grand Canyon. Your
airplane tour with WestWind Air Service will depart early in the morning. You’ll fly some 250 miles across Arizona, taking in the landscape of buttes and colorful red rock outcroppings. When you arrive at the canyon, you’ll spend 20 to 30 minutes flying above both the North and South rims. Needless to say, you’ll want to have your camera with you and plenty of memory space for this excursion.
You can also opt to land at the Grand Canyon to get a closer look at this natural wonder on foot as you learn about its flowers, fauna, and geology. You can also make a stop at Grand Canyon Village, with its stores, historic hotels, and other buildings from the early 20th century, when tourism here was in its infancy. Teddy Roosevelt and painter Thomas Moran, who arrived by train on their visits, would surely be envious of your ability to fly in for a day while enjoying vantages of the canyon that they could only imagine.
The Grand Canyon tour can either be booked as a full-day excursion or, if you want to spend more time in Scottsdale itself, as a shorter air-only one. The latter takes about three hours, but it doesn’t include the chance to land at the canyon and explore on foot.
After you get back to Scottsdale, return to the Omni Montelucia. You’ve resisted, until now, the desire to sit poolside with a good book or explore the enormous Joya spa—a Moroccan-themed escape complete with therapists providing massages, facials, and scrubs. This afternoon, you can give into temptation—at least until it’s time to get ready for dinner.
This evening, you’ll drive to the northern edges of Scottsdale and, as you leave the city behind, you’ll notice an increasing number of dramatic granite boulders dotting the desert hills, while the city lights become merely a glittering glow in the distance. Your destination is the Four Seasons Resort Scottsdale, where
Talavera is located. The restaurant features platters of Spanish cheeses and hams, tapas of grilled octopus and prawns in garlic, and the restaurant’s signature dish: paella, in four different variations. The views of the desert and the night sky pair perfectly with every course.