Dateline May 20, 2017, Sedona with Marty and Jeff
After our day and night at Hueco Tanks, we drove on toward Sedona, stopping a night in Tucson, and reached Marty and Jeff Skelley's home around noon.
Old friends. It had been four years since Janice and Marty were last together. Their friendship goes all the way back to their freshman year of high school, and the old saying held true: it was as if they had been together only the day before. Marty and Jeff had just moved into a lovely home in a pretty neighborhood just outside Sedona, with spectacular views all around. It goes without saying that there was wine and wonderful food; Marty is one of the finest cooks we have ever known, and long before John came along, she and Janice cooked Thanksgiving dinners together for years.
We spent three wonderful days.
The drone. Jeff is a pilot, and he keeps a drone for various photography projects, so one day he took us out into the desert to fly it. John got a turn at the controls for a while and was thrilled.
Then we drove over to a friend's winery, where Jeff sent the drone up to take some pictures of us sitting outside with our wine.
Jeff the artist. Jeff is a genuinely interesting man, and quite an artist; his drawings are wonderful. The work we loved most was a series of bronzes, beautiful things. They gave us one called "Late for Tee," which Jeff based on an old cowboy golf tournament played on horseback that used to happen every year in Arizona. It sits in our house now and it is magnificent.
Jeff is always at work on something, and his most ambitious project is a large architectural model, six feet by four, of a Jewish Temple for Jerusalem. As a piece of work, it is something to see.
The idea behind it is highly contested. Most scholars place the ancient Temple on the Temple Mount, the Haram al-Sharif, where the Dome of the Rock and the al-Aqsa Mosque stand today. Jeff's model follows a minority line of research, drawn from Ernest Martin and Robert Cornuke, that instead places it over the Gihon Spring in the older City of David. It is an unproven and unaccepted theory, whatever Jeff believes, though the craftsmanship is remarkable.
Time to go. We had been parked in the RV space at Sedona Pines Resort, a very nice timeshare community where Marty is an ace saleswoman. Time always runs fast with good friends, and too soon it was time to leave. We pulled out early on Friday, headed for Flagstaff and the road home, with the Petrified Forest and the Painted Desert ahead of us.
