In November 2012, Daniele and I took a camping trip to the South-West US. We flew in and out of Las Vegas, then spent a few days at the Grand Canyon, followed by the Petrified Forest, and Monument Valley. From Monument Valley we tried to hit as many other sites as we could working our way back to Vegas, where we would catch a flighty back to New Jersey for Thanksgiving.

It was a lot of driving but the roads are so open and the scenery is so different from the North-East that it was a pleasure. Our first stop was Glen Canyon Dam. We had kinda wanted to fit in a “Dam” and this one was on our way.

Glen Canyon Dam was nice. We only stayed a little bit, but there was interesting terrain to climb up on and nice views. Groups of tourists arrived in waves to take a picture and continue on their way.


Our bigger stop was Lake Powell — which was very pretty. We drove right down to the beach and hung out here a little while. There were also RVs/Campers parked right on the sandy beach, which seemed like a nice place to park your RV.

We didn’t quite realize how soft and loose the sand was, and we got stuck when we tried to leave. My years experience of getting a car stuck out of snow payed off, we eventually got out without a tow truck. But it was close!

Our next stop was the town on Kanab, which was a nice little stop in a nice little town.

We had lunch in this cute little restaurant. They had an unlimited soup and salad bar for something like $5. There was home-made soups and a really nice salad fixings. As two hungry hikers, we really went to town on this. Also, we probably smelled and looked less than civilized (right before this we had been digging a rental car out of the sand) — but the staff were incredibly sweet. The ladies luncheon going on at the next table only passed us a few sideways glances.

The restaurant staff told us about Best Friends Animal Santuary just on the edge of town. So we went there after lunch to check it out.

We got on one of their last bus tours to the various areas of the sanctuary. My favorite was the cat house. But the bigger animals were cool to see too.

The sun was setting as we were leaving Best Friends. So from there we hit the road until we were just outside Las Vegas. There we found a wide variety of hotels and motels for super cheap. We randomly picked one to sleep and shower (as a courtesy to our fellow airline passengers the next day). In the morning we bummed around Vegas for the day before catching our flight back to New Jersey.

The photos from this part of our South-West Parks / Camping trip are online here:
https://plus.google.com/photos/+KaitlynHanrahanIsidori/albums/6053113319704196817