On my Bucket List

I guess most of us have a “bucket list” of things we’d like to do, places we’d like to see, before we’re too old. One of the things on my bucket list has been to visit the Grand Canyon. Well, now I can cross that off the list. We made a trip this spring to the Grand Canyon and it more than fulfilled my expectations.

It really isn’t all that easy to get to the Grand Canyon, though. It’s not as if it is that close to a major city or has an airport that is easily accessible from Oklahoma; so planning this trip became an exercise in “how much can we see” in addition to the Grand Canyon! In the process of getting there and getting home, I managed to add a few more destinations to my favorites.

We flew to Phoenix, AZ and rented a car for the remainder of our week. This gave us great flexibility, which proved to be a good thing as we took several recommended side trips that we wouldn’t otherwise have seen.

In Phoenix we took an afternoon to visit Taliesin West. This was Frank Lloyd Wright’s winter home and school. It now houses the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture. It is on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places and is a U.S. National Historic Landmark.

After having seen Wright’s impact on Oak Park in Chicago and his novel design of the Price Tower in Bartlesville, I was interested to see how the desert might influence his design. I had also recently read The Women by T.C. Boyle, about Wright and his wives, and found its descriptions of Wright’s love of Asian art and attention to detail in his living quarters to be true to what I observed at Taliesin West.

Frank Lloyd Wright was without a doubt a genius of design, but history has pointed out that his designs were not always engineered as he thought they should be. Taliesin West, however, does not suffer from some of the flaws that other projects encountered. It is to be seen and enjoyed, features to be marveled at, and details to sometimes even laugh at – like living room chairs that are designed to fit the human body in an exact manner but are in fact difficult to get out of!

Phoenix has many sights and places to entice the visitor, but Taliesin West was the only one we had time for on this trip. Guess we’ll just have to make a return visit there one of these days.

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