Western Canyon Tour Live Blog: Day 1

Today we traveled from our home in Kentucky to Page, Arizona!  Ramon found an amazing deal on tickets from Cincinnati to Las Vegas for $550 for all four of us round trip!  We have been talking about exploring some of the national parks for a while now, and we thought this would be the perfect opportunity.

After our 2.5 hour drive to the airport, and completing a full day of road schooling with Zack,  we made it through check in and security with about an hour till our flight.

We did manage to lose Lucy’s iPad at the security checkpoint, because we always have to lose something!  We had about 20 minutes to eat at Panda Express! We managed to eat, do a bathroom stop, and board our flight.

There was some seat changing that we wanted to happen since we were seated three of us together and one separate.  We wanted to be seated so that I could homeschool Zack while Ramon took care of Lucy.  Thankfully, our fellow passengers were willing to switch seats, which has not always been the case.

There was randomly a cloud that looked just like a rock out of Radiator Springs for those Cars fanatics.

There was some beautiful scenery as we passed over the west.

The flight actually went smoothly and I managed to get through a day of homeschooling on the flight.

Unfortunately, with about 5 min before landing we hit a snag.  All of a sudden, Lucy pukes EVERYWHERE!!  We are talking pools of vomit in her carseat!  Since we were in decent, the flight attendants were already seated for landing, and could not bring anything to help us clean it up. We were going to take some pictures to share, but we decided that our friends did not need that visual image in their heads.

We get off the plane, and grabbed our luggage.  First things first … grab clean clothes out of the bag and change Lucy!  Then we get our rental car and start the 4 hour drive to Page, AZ where Antelope Canyon and Horseshoe Bend are!

Before we can begin our drive, we have to load the luggage into the car, which proved difficult despite the fact that we only brought one piece of luggage.  We usually travel with an umbrella stroller because of it’s compact and light nature, but since we wanted to use a stroller on some of the hiking trails, we chose to bring our large all terrain stroller.  Fitting this stroller and our luggage into the trunk of our Ford Focus was not happening, so we put the luggage between the children.  We thought putting a divider between them would help them calm down and (hopefully) fall asleep on the trip.  We were wrong.  We quickly learned exactly how much entertainment a piece of luggage can provide.

Since today happened to be Ramon’s birthday, we naturally stopped at McDonalds (his favorite restaurant) for dinner on the way to the hotel.

The restaurant gave us a wonderful birthday gift, a play place!  The kids got to burn of some energy, and we got to have a conversation that did not involve telling kids to use inside voices or counting to three!  Driving along, we were amazed how beautiful the scenery was!

The desert landscape was impressive.

As we drove through Utah and Arizona, the sun goes down, and you could really see all of the stars and the moon.   There is nothing around.  It was only 9:45 local time when we pulled into the Holiday Inn Express, but it is almost 1AM our time and we started our day at 7:00AM, and we were exhausted.

Given this was a last minute trip, the hotel pricing was absurd.  For those Notre Dame fans, the pricing was worse than South Bend on a football weekend.  A Motel 6 was running about $220 + taxes.  Thankfully, we had some rewards points to bail us out of the crazy pricing for Page, AZ.

Luckily our hotel had a small laundromat for us to wash our car seat cover and Lucy’s clothes, otherwise, the smell in the car in the morning would have been interesting to say the least.  We are excited to start our tour of Antelope Canyon tomorrow morning at 10:00 am.

Check out what we did the next day here.