I’ve been in planning mode for the last couple months. And we leave in around 57 hours and I am still trying to book the last couple nights of our trip. Now, it is a 3 week trip, so I still have some time, but I hoped to get everything booked before we left so we’d have a plan. Not that that means anything, since this is our first RV trip, we may find that we can’t do everything as fast as we had anticipated, so… we plan, but know that things may actually change, and we’ll roll with it.
A big bummer was when I was looking into where we could park/drive at Monument Valley and I found out that we can’t actually drive the RV through Monument Valley… To get there and back to the Grand Canyon from Scottsdale, AZ adds about 6 hours to the trip. So rather than drive all the way there to see what we can see before we can go no further, we are going to skip Monument Valley this trip and spend extra time at the Grand Canyon. We had originally planned to stop in Chicago for a night, but the Memorial Day murder rate helped me decide we could skip it this trip, and plan for that when the kids are older. We also planned for a stop in St Louis to see the Arch, but the 2 RV parking areas around there sounded like they weren’t in the best neighborhood, then there was the whole flooding, so… we’ll just pass by the Arch on the freeway… I think… (I haven’t actually solidified the exact routes yet, but we do have apps for that) and keep moving on to our next stop, and plan the actual visit to the Arch for when the kids are older as well. Part of the hesitation for just getting an RV site and Ubering is that we have 3 kids in car seats still, so if we were to Uber, we’d have 3 car seats to contend with wherever we are Ubering to. Thankfully, my parents are renting a minivan for while we are in Michigan for the wedding so that we can get around and leave the seats in the car while we go to the wedding and reception.
Since we will now have over 24 hours at the Grand Canyon, I found out we can take a train ride (https://www.thetrain.com/) to the Grand Canyon, so that saves me from trying to figure out where we should stay and how best to get to and park at the Grand Canyon with an RV, plus it means we can stay put for 2 nights. And, the train actually has an RV parking area so we can pull in for the night, wake up early, head to the train, spend a few hours at the Grand Canyon, then ride the train back to the RV, and wake up early on the 31st for our long drive home. They actually give a AAA discount too, so that’s a perk. However… you do get charged $35 for entry into the Grand Canyon unless you have and NPS Annual Pass.
What’s an NPS Annual Pass??? It’s a pass you can get for $80 that will allow you into all the parks on the list for an entire year. And you can buy it online… however… you can’t print your pass, they have to mail it to you, and since I am just looking into this 2 days before our trip… I don’t think that’s enough time to order our pass and have it arrive. You can pick up a pass from any of the parks though, so I am going to have Ryan try to run out to Lake Kaweah tomorrow to grab a pass, then hope that we can enter our pass online to save the $35 on the train tickets. If you are planning a trip to several parks this year, look into getting the America The Beautiful annual pass to save you some money https://www.nps.gov/planyourvisit/passes.htm#CP_JUMP_5088574
Here’s the locations you can visit with the pass: https://store.usgs.gov/s3fs-public/PassIssuanceList.pdf
I’m sure I’ll learn more as we go, but for now I need to figure out how we can do a tour of Hoover Dam since… that is actually our first stop on day 1… so I better get to figuring that one out sooner, rather than later. https://www.usbr.gov/lc/hooverdam/service/DamTour.html Looks like we won’t be taking the tour since you can’t go on the tour if you are under 8, and our kids are only 2.5, 4.5, and 6.5. Guess that will have to wait for another trip as well!
And what time are we actually leaving on Thursday morning? I don’t know yet… depends how late we are up on Wednesday night loading up the RV. I do have boxes all over the house right now with things I have already packed. And I’m praying that the kids aren’t taking things out and leaving them where I can’t see them because I am mentally checking them off the list as I put them into the boxes… Worst case… we can buy what we need on the road, thought I’d rather not spend money on something we already have… but the most important things for me to remember are… my grandma’s China that I am taking across the country for my sister, and our wedding attire… since we kinda need that for the wedding. Everything else… can be replaced… but I’m going to try to remember much as I possibly can so we can limit the amount of stops we have to make to buy what we forgot.