I’m formally assigned to a fire right now, and while I almost passed up on this past weekend to sneak in an extra day of work, I’m really glad I pushed myself to follow through with the plans I’d committed to months ago when I booked rooms and bought tickets.
I spent this past weekend down in Arizona’s Verde Valley with two of my good Flagstaff friends — Jenni and Lexie — for two days centered around wine and nature.
A few months back, Jenni had the idea to spend a day on the Verde Canyon Railroad. I’ll get more into it later on in this post, but the railroad, based in Clarkdale, runs refurbished rail cars along the Verde River in the Verde Canyon. A round trip is a few hours, and each rail car comes with a tour guide-slash-bartender.
So, we bought tickets, booked a hotel and planned an entire girls’ weekend in the Verde Valley.
We got into Cottonwood on Friday evening, and our first stop was Pizzeria Bocce for Margherita pizza, fondue, salad and cocktails.
We checked into our Airbnb afterward. I’m really picky about Airbnbs because I don’t like displacing local residents by giving my money to short term rentals, but the Airbnb we stayed in was a basement unit owned by a wonderful woman named Aileen. She lived upstairs and was so friendly and nice! She greeted us when we checked in to show us the space and, as an aside, we didn’t have to clean the apartment before the cleaners arrived. It’s the first time in a long time I’ve had a good experience with Airbnb.
We went to bed fairly early Friday night, and then Saturday morning, we woke up and went to Crema for brunch.
After brunch, we made our way to Tuzigoot National Monument for the morning.
I’ll detail our entire excursion there in a separate post soon, but it was really cool to check out the visitor center, explore the site and take a hike through marsh land.
After Tuzigoot, we went back to our Airbnb, showered and changed, and headed out to go wine tasting.
First up was Alcantara.
Lexie, Jenni and I got three flights: the white/rosé, medium red and bold red, and found a spot in the shade near the vineyards.
We all loved the bold red the best. My two favorite wines were the 2021 Petite Syrah, which was plummy, leathery and spicy, and the 2021 Grand Rouge GRV, which tasted like caramelized vanilla sugar, roasted pomegranates and acidic coffee.
Then, we headed downtown for dinner. We had a bit of time before dinner, so we’d decided to go to the new Merkin Vineyards hilltop winery for a quick drink before grabbing dinner elsewhere.
If you’re not familiar, Merkin Vineyards and Caduceus Cellars are the project of Maynard James Keenan of “Tool” fame.
We almost didn’t go because it’s weird and gimmicky and who really wants to go to a restaurant named after a pubic wig but we decided to go anyway.
And honestly, we’re glad we did.
I had a flight of rosé wines, and while they weren’t fantastic, the food was really good.
We had bruschetta with mascarpone and roasted tomatoes for the table to share, and I had an order of mac and cheese for dinner.
The mac and cheese was made with prickly pear infused pasta with mascarpone cream sauce and topped with beet powder. It was one of the best things the three of us (we all tried each other’s dishes) ate all weekend.
Plus — the view was incredible, the atmosphere was great and the facility itself was actually really nice.
Color me pleasantly surprised!
After our wine flights and dinner, we had gelato at the base of the Trattoria (salted caramel for me) and then walked around Old Town Cottonwood for a bit before heading back to our Airbnb.
We woke up Sunday, checked out of our Airbnb, and made our way back downtown. We had pastries and coffee at Crema and walked around some of the Old Town shops for a bit before we made our way to the train station for our Verde Canyon Railroad excursion!
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We got to the station two hours before our scheduled departure. The package we bought included a lunch from the station’s cafe, a four-punch ticket for wine tasting at the station, a snack box on the train, a sparkling wine toast as we departed the station.
The only downfall was that it was so, so windy!
My wine actually blew out of my tasting cup at the first wine booth I sampled.
Luckily the wind died down quite a bit once we made it onto the train into the canyon.
One of the really cool things about the Verde Canyon Railroad is the train cars. The train cars are all restored vintage cars, and in between every two enclosed cars is a shaded, open-air viewing car for outdoor sightseeing.
Each indoor car comes with its own guide-slash-bartender, and the outdoor cars had two guides, as well as benches that ran down the middle of each car.
In addition to music, the train cars also played looping interpretive tours for the four hours of riding.
If you’re planning on booking, I’d definitely recommend booking as a group of two or four. The seating configurations are set up for groups of either two or four around a table. Since we were an odd-numbered group, we ended up next to another odd-numbered group, so we were sharing one of our couch seats with a total stranger.
However — the total stranger was very nice, and spent most of the excursion in the open-air train car outside, so we were mostly left to ourselves on our shared loveseat during the portions of the ride we spent in our seats.
The outdoor car didn’t have assigned seats, so we were free to stand, lean against the railings and move around on the benches.
You’re not allowed to bring your own food on the four-hour excursion, which is a bit of a bummer because I would have rather packed my own food for the ride. I didn’t really love the cafe option, and the snack box was pretty meat-heavy.
Once our train arrived back at the station, we disembarked and headed back up to Flagstaff.
It was (of course) raining, hailing and snowing back up the hill.
Welcome home!
I’m so glad I went. This was one of those trips that I didn’t realized I needed until I was on it. We’re already talking about making an annual our trip down to the Verde Valley an annual thing.
So fingers crossed that happens!
