Trip to Jerome AZ - Changes

Taking a day trip to Jerome AZ should not be such a big deal for three girlfriends since we live in Prescott – not so far away.  Finding a day that worked for all of us took a while!  I’ve wanted to go to Nellie Bly ‘the biggest kaleidoscope store in the world’ for 16 years!  They have been open for 25 years but I’ve only known they existed for 16. 
 We left at 10 a.m. and lunched in Jerome at ‘Grapes’.  Each of us ordered a different dish and shared great food and fun.   Sounds like a girl’s day out, doesn’t it?  We visited just about every store.  Of course, I stayed in Nellie Bly’s a long time.  I just missed the annual workshop teaching how to make those incredible tubes of color and changing shapes.  It’s on my calendar for next year.
If you haven’t guessed, I’m crazy for kaleidoscopes.  Once when there were many things happening in my life, I took a class called ‘Changes’.  There was discussion on why and how changes affect us, what we could do to help ourselves travel through the change and come out with a positive attitude.  One suggestion was to select something that would signify change and help us see it for what it was.  I chose kaleidoscopes because each time I looked through one, there was a difference configuration.  Each change of color and shape was beautiful and new.  Kaleidoscopes remind me that with each change comes a shift, an unsettling that becomes new and exciting – an adventure and a new picture.  Now I collect a kaleidoscope with each big change in my life.  I could have stayed in that store all day and will just have to go back again and again!
In a store “Lola….whatever she wants” looking up on a high shelf, I saw wonderful manikin heads from the 1920’s and 1940’s.  Spectacular!  Oh to have one to display a hat.
On and on we went visiting most of the stores.  I guess I will confess: outside the last gallery I was spellbound looking at the revolving sculpture and fell face forward into a very large bush of lavender.  It broke my fall so I was not hurt and it happened so fast that I just remember the fragrance that surrounded me.   The plant and I will survive and Jerome will forever be associated with kaleidoscopes and lavender.

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Location: 593 State Highway 89A, Prescott National Forest, Jerome, AZ 86331, USA

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