For Austin's birthday this year, we decided to pack our hiking gear and explore the beauty and wonder of the southwestern region of the United States. If you are looking for a super fun, 4-day road-trip, than this is the trip for you! We stayed in a different city every night and explored every day. I've captured our entire trip below and provided a high level itinerary up front in case you don't want to read everything. I do love to write, so sorry in advance for the length! Let the adventure begin!
Our itinerary:
Start
|
End (Hotels)
|
Sites Visited
|
|
Day 0
|
Dallas, Texas
|
Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino
Las Vegas, Nevada
|
|
Day 1
|
Las Vegas, Nevada
|
Best Western Plus Ruby’s Inn
Bryce Canyon City,
Utah
|
Zion National Park
|
Day 2
|
Bryce Canyon City, Utah
|
Lake Powell Resort
Page, Arizona
|
Bryce Canyon National Park, Horseshoe Bend
|
Day 3
|
Page, Arizona
|
The Grand Hotel at the Grand Canyon
Grand Canyon
Village, Arizona
|
Antelope Slot Canyons, Monument Valley, and Grand Canyon
(Desert View)
|
Day 4
|
Grand Canyon Village, Arizona
|
Stratosphere Hotel Casino & Resort
Las Vegas, Nevada
|
Grand Canyon
|
Day 0:
Our adventure started in Las Vegas, Nevada. We flew in late Tuesday evening, picked up our rental car, and had a yummy midnight dinner at the Peppermill, which was right up the street from our hotel. Speaking of our hotel, we stayed at the Westgate Las Vegas Resort & Casino for $25 plus tax and resort fees. (Pro-tip: if you want a good deal on a Vegas hotel, go in the middle of the week. This same hotel is listed for $250+ on the weekends. CRAZY!!)
Day 1 | Zion National Park:
After a great night's rest, we set out to start our adventure. But first, BREAKFAST! We've always wanted to try Hash House A Go Go but never had the time to make the stop. Y'all...it was amazing! Our waiter was so kind, the food was delicious, and the portions were HUGE! I ordered Andy's chicken & waffles, and Austin had Andy's sage fried chicken benedict.
Now that our bellies were full, we were ready to begin the drive to Zion National Park in Utah. From Las Vegas, the drive takes approximately 2 hours and 45 minutes. I always use Google maps, so there may be a quicker way if you use Waze. There was hardly anyone on the road, so it made for a very easy drive. Do keep in mind that you lose an hour on this drive, as the time zone switches to Mountain time when you arrive in Utah.
After a few hours, we arrived at Zion National Park around 5:30 p.m. The entry fee to get into Zion was $35 for the two of us. (Pro-tip: if you plan to make this exact same trip, invest in the annual pass for $80. We entered three national parks during this trip, and the total cost could have surpassed $100. However, since we purchased the annual pass, all we paid was $80 and it's good for a year!)
We parked our car near the Zion National Park Visitor Center and hopped on one of the free shuttles to take us to the starting point for Angel's Landing. The shuttle will take you all throughout the park, but if you're hiking Angel's Landing, get off at stop #6; The Grotto.
As soon as we stepped off the shuttle, the beauty of Zion immediately took our breath away.
I wanted to just stand there and take endless amounts of photos, but we were losing daylight and had to get moving if we wanted to make it to Angel's Landing. The hike usually takes around 4 hours round-trip. (Pro-tip: we heard that the best time to go is either first thing in the morning or later in the evening. This trail is super popular and gets crowded very quickly. Since the climb up can be fairly dangerous, we chose to come later in the day to avoid having to maneuver around a lot of people.)
The hike is listed as strenuous, but we didn't think it was that bad. One of our 1.5 mile hikes in Banff was wayyyyy worse than this one. You do hike up some pretty crazy switchbacks to get up the mountain, but the views help take your mind off of it.
The "toughest" part is once you get to Scout Lookout, where you have to basically "climb" for .5 miles up to the top of Angel's Landing as you hold on to a metal chain rope. If you have a fear of heights, I highly recommend to sit this one out.
Oddly enough, I never got scared or doubted myself on this hike. If anything, Austin kept getting on to me for not holding on to the chain on our climb up. Once we got up to the top, I felt like we conquered the world. The view was magnificent!
Sadly our time at the top had to come to an end, because I was freaking out that we'd be hiking down in the dark and I didn't want to get eaten by a bear. Yeah, I go from 0 to 100 real quick on the doom and gloom meter. Ha! We did have around 30 minutes before the sun went down, so it was pretty neat to hike down and watch the sunset.
We were the last ones to come down the mountain. The air was so cool and you could hear the wind whistling along with all of the other sounds of nature. It was so neat! What did throw us off was encountering a big pile of human poo on the paved trail on the way back down. LOL. Geez... why couldn't they have done it off the main trail? It was literally 2 feet away. Thank goodness we were paying attention! (Pro-tip: please never take a dump on the main trail.)
Once we made it back to the bottom, we hopped on the last shuttle back to the Visitor Center to grab our car. We were STARVING at this point, and since it was Austin's birthday, we ate Mexican food!
We went to Bit and Spur Restaurant and Saloon in the town of Springdale, just 2 miles down the road from Zion. I started out with a non-alcoholic blueberry mint mojito and Austin had a "Mint Rumney" with their local Utah spiced rum. Both were fabulous! For our entrees, Austin had the pork carnitas burrito and I had the cheese enchiladas and beef taco. (Pro-tip: if you love chips and salsa, PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE get it here. My mouth is watering as I'm typing this, because it's probably the best salsa we've ever had.)
At last, our first day was over and we needed to figure out where we were going to sleep. We had an idea of what we wanted to do each day, but weren't sure how long our adventures would take, so we didn't book hotels in advance just in case we wanted to shift our plans at the last minute. Usually if you book in advance you get a pretty good hotel rate, but since the majority of our travel is nonrev and we never know if we will make it somewhere, we always use last minute travel websites (ex: hotels.com, hotwire.com, priceline.com, or hotelstonight.com).
We knew we wanted to do Bryce Canyon for day 2, so we hopped on one of those sites above and found a pretty good rate (plus free breakfast!) at the Best Western Plus Ruby’s Inn in Bryce Canyon City, Utah. Bryce Canyon is about 2 hours away from Zion, but we still had some energy left so we hopped back in the car and drove up north. I wish I had pictures of our drive to Bryce Canyon. It was pitch black driving through the mountains and you could see every single star in the sky. It was pretty incredible to see!
We made it to our hotel just after midnight and passed out. We had a pretty great day 1.
Woke up feeling SOOOOO sore. Holy cow—every inch of my body hurt, but I was so proud of what we accomplished the day before. We made our way out of bed at some point, put on our slippers and went to the main dining hall for our complimentary breakfast buffet. I didn't take any pics of the food or the restaurant, but it felt like a campground. It was so fun. I did, however, take a snapshot of the outside of the building (see below). This town was so small and Bryce National Canyon is truly the main attraction. The folks in this town are so proud of their small town feel and their Canyon, as they should be! We were so excited to hop on the free shuttle (with park admission) that picked us up in front of our hotel and head to the Canyon.
We rode the shuttle to Sunset Point (stop #6) and got off to hike part of the the Rim Trail. The Rim Trail is pretty great because it's paved and offers a fantastic scenic overlook of the Canyon.
We only had time to hike one other trail, so we decided on Queen's Garden (1.8 miles). I don't know if I was just exhausted from the previous day, but I was dying on this hike. The first mile is all down hill, which was awesome, but coming back up was rough.
The scenery was pretty darn cool, though. All of these rocks around us are called hoodoos.
We finally made our way back up to the top of the trail and hopped back on the shuttle to get our car. Once we got back into town, we looked around at some of the smaller gift shops and stopped for lunch at Bryce Canyon Pines to fuel up before we got back on the road. We both had some pretty fantastic sandwiches; grilled ham and cheese and a BLT. Yum! Because there is always time for pie, we both shared a slice of homemade boysenberry!!
The second stop for day 2 was in Page, Arizona, so we had a 2 hour and 40 minute drive ahead of us. We cranked up some Hootie and the Blowfish on the radio and were on our way.
We arrived at our destination a little earlier than expected, so we checked in to the hotel that I booked on the drive over called Lake Powell Resort. This hotel had a gorgeous view of the lake, but I wouldn't stay here again unless we were doing something "on" the lake. (Note: I didn't realize this during booking, but this hotel is inside Glen Canyon National Recreation Area, so you have to pay $30 to get in, or you can use your National Park annual pass).
One of the most confusing things on earth was the freaking time zones. Our hotel was in Mountain time, but just one mile up the road where all of our plans were for that evening and the next morning was Arizona time, which was an hour behind. Y'all, I have never been so stressed out in my life. I had no idea what the actual time was at any given point and was so worried that we were going to miss our tour time the next morning since our hotel was in a different time zone! It was bananas.
We finally tried to figure out the timing and headed over a few miles down the road to watch the sunset at Horseshoe Bend. We thought we had 30 minutes left before the sun went down, but because of the freaking time zone debacle, we had an hour and 30 minutes. LOL.😂 It wouldn't have been that bad, but it was hot as blazes, so we stayed as long as we could to get some really cool shots.
We were exhausted after a jam-packed day of adventure, so we headed to Canyon King Pizzeria in downtown Page, Arizona for a quick slice of pizza and then went to bed, because we had an early wake-up time the next morning!
Our alarms went off at 5 a.m. and we started getting ready for our 6:30 a.m. tour of the Antelope Slot Canyons. Normally, I am SO not a morning person, but I was so pumped for this tour that we arrived an hour before we were supposed to. I can also probably attribute that to the time zone fear, but whatever. 😆
We used Antelope Slot Canyon Tours and paid $120 total for the both of us. You cannot enter Antelope Canyon without a native Navajo guide, so you must book through a tour company. (Pro-tip: the first and last tours of the day are the cheapest, but the best time to go to see the sun beams are the 10:30 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. tours. You'll pay the most for those time slots but I've heard the photos are worth it. Also, book in advance if you want those specific time slots.)
Our tour guide was great and showed us the spots where we could get the best photos. I've never experienced anything like it! It's pretty crazy that water sculpted these canyons.
I would have loved to spend more time here, but sadly the tour only lasts for an hour and a half. Would totally do this again, but during one of the prime time tours.
Horseshoe Bend and the Slot Canyons were the only two attractions on our list for this stop, so it was time to get back on the road and continue heading east. But first, we stopped for breakfast at the Ranch House Grille for some country cooking.
Next stop for day 3 was Monument Valley Park and we had to drive 2 hours and 20 minutes to get there from Page, Arizona. The drive was so fun because there was so much to look at, including a plethora of sandstone "buttes" on both sides of the road.
We arrived to Monument Valley Tribal Park around noon and had to pay $20 total for our entrance fee. (Note: this park is not considered a US National Park, so you can't use your annual pass here, but it's totally worth the cost.) Truly, Monument Valley was the highlight of our trip! Once we entered the park, we drove to the Visitor Center to get a map and to check out the routes from above.
Can you see the white squiggly line through the middle of the photo above? That's the road we drove on. If you look real close, you might be able to see some of the cars driving on the road! This park is massive! It's a 17-mile scenic loop drive and will take you about 3 hours to complete. Cars can drive on this road (what we were in) but it might be less bumpy if you have a 4x4. Nonetheless, you'll have a great time, especially if you crank up "Life is a Highway" by Rascal Flatts.
I have so many photos from this part of the trip, so if you want more, just let me know! If you ever get a chance to add this to your itinerary, please do. You won't regret it!
We had one more stop to make before we got on the road again, Forrest Gump Point, which was 20 minutes up the road from the Monument Valley Visitor Center. It's the same scenery you saw in the park, but it makes for a great photo! Please be careful in this spot if you do indulge, as you have to get into the middle of the highway for that "perfect" shot.
We wrapped up this fun little highway iPhone photo shoot and got back in the car to head to our final stop on the trip, the Grand Canyon! The drive from Monument Valley to the Grand Canyon was probably the longest car ride we had on this trip. It took about 3 hours but we gained an hour back since we were traveling back west to Arizona.
I never knew how big the Grand Canyon was until we started driving through it. It took 45 minutes to get from that Grand Canyon entrance sign to our hotel. It felt like FOREVER, but it's probably because we did a lot of driving and activities on day 3.
I have to say...the drive is something to write home about!
After stopping to capture some photos and watching a grown-a** man almost get tore up by a mule deer because he was trying to pet it, we arrived at our fabulous hotel!
We stayed at the Grand Hotel just south of the Grand Canyon gates. This was definitely the nicest hotel we stayed in during the trip, and again, we purchased this on the 3 hour drive here on hotels.com. If my Disney pals are reading this, it reminded me a lot of Wilderness Lodge! It was a beautiful hotel.
We threw our stuff in the room and walked across the street to have dinner at Plaza Bonita. You HAVE to order the tacos al pastor if you come here. They're fabulous!!
...and just like that, day 3 is complete. One more day to go!
I think our bodies knew that we were exhausted because we didn't wake up until 11 a.m. It felt so good to sleep in and have a low-key morning because we went hard for 3 days in a row. We were able to wake up at our own pace and head across the street again for a light breakfast and coffee at RP's Stage Shop. I really thought there would be more restaurants in this little town just south of the Grand Canyon, but there really wasn't. It
Once we were finished with breakfast, we put on our hiking gear and headed into Grand Canyon National Park. We had every intention of hiking the trails, but as soon as Austin saw a sign that said "Bike Rentals" our game plan was over. He loves biking and since we did so much hiking the three days prior, I was totally up for biking the Grand Canyon. Plus, you get to maximize your time and see more in a shorter amount of time. We paid $55 for both of us to have 2 hours of riding time. We biked the orange bike ride to Yaki Point, about 6 miles round trip. The ride was beautiful!
Well, after our bike ride was over, our 4 day road-trip was complete! The last thing we did was head back to Las Vegas to catch our flight back to Dallas on Sunday morning.
We did stop at a restaurant on Route 66 called Westside Lilo's on the way there and had the most delicious slice of carrot cake!
I think we definitely earned our Wilderness Explorer badge on this trip, wouldn't ya say? We truly had the best time and loved getting to experience the southwest region of the US. Our world is so fascinating and I'm so thankful that we have a job that allows us to see the world. Hope you enjoyed this write-up! Please let me know if you have any questions!
Until next time,
Brittany
