Funny stories. travel details & Las Vegas

 Ryan likes ONE and only one kind of Cheesehead string cheese sticks.  He likes the swirl ones that have gotten nicknamed "squirrels" at our house.  For some reason, probably shipping/COVID related we had not been able to find them in our area in MONTHS.  I had looked in Atlanta, Blue Ridge, Asheville, and even Raleigh and Blacksburg, Virginia when we were doing college visits and found NO cheesehead swirls.  However, we stopped at a walmart just outside Las Vegas to buy water bottles and a cooler and I found some!!!!  Ryan was very happy!  Then we bought more in Flagstaff, Arizona too and brought them all home in our checked luggage!

We met some people from South Carolina and MANY from Texas and laughed about Southerners being the people who would talk to each other on the hiking trails!

I did not know that there were Chick Fil A and Kohl's stores out west.  We saw a giant Target in Las Vegas and there were Subway and Arby's restaurants EVERYWHERE it seemed.

For those who have asked about detail of where we stayed/visited:

We flew in/out of Las Vegas because that's where we could find best plane ticket prices on Delta.

We stayed at the Grand Canyon Plaza Hotel.

Our helicopter tour was with Maverick Helicopters.  They were GREAT!

We rented bikes from Bright Angel Bicycles at Grand Canyon and they were great to deal with also.

We stayed at Holiday Inn and Suites in Moab, Utah.

We stayed at the Best Western Plus in Bryce Canyon City, Utah.  They had large rooms compared to other hotels we had been in.

We stayed at Holiday Inn Express in Springdale, Utah.

We stayed in Springhill Suites Las Vegas North Speedway-it was a nice hotel in a nice quiet area.

All Trails is a great app with information about hiking trails and I found this blog to be a great resource of information too about parks and hiking trails.  They also had some hotel, restaurant, and other information.

https://www.earthtrekkers.com/

There was SO much to see-I think you really could spend months in that part of the country and still not see it all!

We drove through Las Vegas and got out on the strip to walk around and see some of the famous hotels from the outside before our flight home.  It was CRAZY hot there that morning and I was sad that the Bellagio fountains were not running but the hotels were neat to see in person-after having seen so many in movies or on tv.

Ashley wants to visit Paris and see the Eiffel tower so I took her picture with it when we could first see it.

I took the above picture because I thought it was funny that there was a McDonalds on the strip in Las Vegas

We saw a boat out of the Bellagio fountains doing cleaning work

This sign made me laugh-guess they do have people who want to swim in their fountains!

There were slot machines everywhere!  These were in a mall we walked inside.  They had them all over at the airport too.

Lots of cool New York things

Lots of neat sculptures, cactus, and unusual trees and flowers that we don't have back here on the east coast.

The pyramid at the Luxor that lights up crazily at night.

They even have beautiful views of the mountains from in the city.  This was one of the last pictures I took as we left the strip to go back to the airport.

Zion Canyon

 We came into Springdale, Utah on Thursday afternoon.  We had time to check into our hotel and get ready for a jeep tour that evening.

So for our tour we were actually driving on Bureau of Land Management land-which our driver told us is 70% of the land in Utah.  We had tons of amazing views from our stops.  It was fun, too, since we were not in a National Park that we could pick up rocks to take home as souvenirs.  We also picked up a stick to bring home for Max and Gromit got a tiny piece of it.

Picnic pizza dinner in the 3rd row of the jeep!

SO beautiful!!!

Friday was one of everyone's favorites of the trip-we had a canyoneering trip with Zion Adventure Company-they took fabulous care of us, were very safety conscious and wanted to make sure that everyone enjoyed the day!  We left the camera at home and got our guides to take pictures of us with Greg's phone.

We hiked up a good bit to start and then got to do several rappels.  It was really fun and Ashley especially was sad for it to end.  She would have been happy to go on ALL day!

Ryan going down-you can tell it's him if the legs look insanely long!

Scott enjoyed belaying (holding on to our ropes as we were coming down) us as we came down and our guides taught Ashley too which she thought was really fun

No hands!

We had a great time and really enjoyed our canyoneering trip!

They recommended and we were happy to follow their advice-ice cream from Springdale Candy Company.  It was a great recommendation!

downtown Springdale and the beautiful views from there

The candy company also had chocolate covered twinkies!!!

In the afternoon we drove into the park and did our final hike on the Canyon Overlook trail.  You go up a bunch of stairs and then hike around to an amazing view of the canyon.  By this point in the week we were tired but I definitely thought the view was worth it!

MORE rock piles to add to!

Some of these reminded me of the canyons near Malibu, California where the opening scenes for the tv show MASH were filmed.

fun rocks to climb on

Think we are going to have a hard time choosing just 1 family picture for the Christmas card this year!