My husband and I drove the scenic two-hour drive from our home in Scottsdale to Flagstaff on Saturday morning. As an NAU alum, he was jazzed to return to his college town and relive his glory days… twenty years later. After a quick lunch at Buster’s Restaurant & Bar – our traditional spot for watching football and good eats in Flag – we checked into the Little America Hotel, our lodging for the night.

The Little America is an elegant, upscale hotel located minutes from the downtown Flagstaff area. Although clearly an older hotel, this classic fixture of Flagstaff lodging has been nicely updated with flat-screen TVs, elegant decor, large bathrooms & guestrooms. I’ve stayed at the Little America about half a dozen times and I’m never disappointed. The staff is friendly, polite and thorough; the front desk and concierge consistently deliver four-star service. The hotel is immaculate and very reasonably priced – a tremendous value for the dollar.

After the homecoming game, our Little America concierge made reservations for us at Pasto, a fine-dining Italian restaurant in downtown Flagstaff. The perfect romantic dinner spot for my husband and me, Pasto’s exposed brick walls and simply candlelit decor fits in well with the Flagstaff downtown vibe. Pasto’s upscale and ecelectic menu of traditional Italian fare mixed with a selection of artisan cheeses & breads, game birds & other unusual proteins, and appealing flavor profiles made browsing the menu like watching an episode of “Top Chef.” While we fancy ourselved “foodies,” my husband and I were in the mood for a fairly light dinner, so we settled on a “create-your-own” antipasto to start and had house specialty entrees of portebello mushroom ravioli and jumbo prawns in a tomato-cream sauce. A nice wine list and desserts (we shared the chocolate & volipicello crema… essentially a rich chocolate pudding infused with red wine – divine and rich!) topped off our night.

Sunday morning, we headed for home early. After a quick stop at Starbucks on Milton Road, we hit the highway leaving behind another set of good memories to add to my husband’s college-days nostalgia and my Arizona travel mental scrapbook.

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