We've been back from vacation for a week. Normally I would have started writing about our vacation right away, but I had to catch up and work AND try to get through a school course in a week. I did those things, but all week long I've been looking forward to the chance to write about our trip.
So let's get going.
Road trips have been a long standing tradition for me and Brandon. Over the years, we've have gone on road trips to Yellowstone, California, Southern Utah, the Texas Coastline, Kentucky and Tennessee, Northern Idaho, and Washington.
For the past several years I've wanted to take the kids to San Diego, California for Spring Break. I was hoping that we could make that happen this year, but it didn't look like this would be the year we could do that. There were several reasons.
1. Our car is getting old. Our Honda Pilot recently passed 250,000 miles. It's a Honda so it's still super reliable, but a 1600+ mile round trip drive didn't feel prudent.
2. Our kids are getting tall. The Honda has many amazing features, but the 3rd row does not have a lot of leg room. Poor Derrick can barely fit back there. He starts getting restless around the 3 hour mark on our drives to Utah. And it's not like I have a smaller child I can rotate back there. Everyone is the same size. So a 24+ hour round trip drive didn't sound like something we could survive with our sanity intact.
3. Financially it didn't make sense. Brandon has a new, good paying job, but he only started there at the beginning of February. A trip to San Diego - with all the fun things we'd want to do once we got there - didn't work with our current financial situation.
4. Gas Prices were pretty high. Gas prices weren't that high when I started planning the trip, but when they shot up a few weeks before our trip I was VERY happy that I we weren't going all the way to San Diego.
Even though a road trip to San Diego couldn't happen, we could still go on a road trip for Spring Break - just someplace closer. Brandon and I talked about places we wanted to go. We had several ideas. Places like Arches National Park, Zion National Park, or Mesa Verde. But none of those felt right.
At some point one of us tossed out the idea of going to Nevada. The Nevada border is less than 50 miles south of our house, but we've never crossed that border as a family. We decided it was finally time to do that.
This opened up all sorts of possibilities. I ordered a Travel Brochure from the State of Nevada and started pouring over it.
Brandon and I decided to go all the way to Las Vegas. I wanted to be warm on this trip and Vegas was definitely a place we could be warm. To get to Vegas from Twin Falls, we would drive down Highway 93. I decided to keep our trip confined to the area around Highway 93. So we wouldn't go over to the Reno area. We would go to Ely because it's on highway 93 and I've had a couple things in the Ely area on my bucket list for years.
As the trip was still taking shape in my mind, I found out that the opening day of Lagoon would be the last Saturday of our Spring Break. We'd bough season passes to Lagoon as a Christmas gift this year so it made sense to add Lagoon to the end of our road trip.
With all this in mind I started making plans for where we would stay each night. I went into this assuming we would camp most nights. Most of our road trips are also camping trips. We love camping and we love how inexpensive camping is.
But I ran into a few problems with this plan.
1. There was nowhere to tent camp in Las Vegas. There was a KOA near Vegas, but there weren't any tent spots. (I guess it's just too hot in the summer so they don't make in an option the rest of the year.)
2. There was no where to tent camp in Ely. There was a KOA with tent spots, but the restrooms were being remodeled so visitors needed to have their own bathroom farcicalities. That's not a problem for people with RV's, but it was obviously a deal breaker for those of us with tents.
3. The state parks didn't have camping reservations. There were a few state parks that I wanted to visit that had campgrounds. But they only had first-come-first-serve spots. My travel anxiety can't handle that kind of uncertainty. I needed a campground where knew I'd have a spot.
The lack of camping options pushed me to make a decision that I've never made before:
We would stay in a hotel every night on our vacation.
We've never done this before. We've stayed in a hotel once or twice on a road trip, but never the whole trip.
The only time that came close was when we moved back from Alabama to Utah. We stayed in hotels that whole trip. But we were travelling with a moving van so it was hardly a care free vacation.
Deciding to stay in hotels would make our trip cost more, but in a way it made the trip cost less. Because we didn't have to bring any camping gear we didn't have to put the "hat" on the top of the car. This would save us on gas money. (Which was a better and better deal the more gas prices rose.)
Also, because we didn't need to bring all that gear we could pack lighter in general. This gave everyone a little more room in the car. Every time I felt like our vacation was more expensive than usual I told myself, "It's cheaper than a new car."
The best thing about staying in hotels was how much free time it gave Brandon. We work together on these trips, but Brandon takes care of the most physically taxing work. He's the one who climbs the car to put the hat on. He shoves the heavy camping gear up there. Even the "lighter" things take up a lot of his time. He cooks all the meals - which is tricky when everything is outdoors.
He usually doesn't mind these things, but when he realized that this trip didn't involve cooking outdoors or packing the hat he said, "This feels like the first trip we take that will actually be a vacation."
Giving Brandon a real vacation seemed worth any cost.
Okay I think that's enough back story for now. Let's actually talk about this trip.
We left on the trip on Monday, March 21st. We all got up around 7:00 AM and started packing the car. Brandon had taken care of getting all the food packed and I'd taken care of getting all the clothes packed. But even these things hadn't been as much work as usual. Since we'd be staying in cities during this whole trip we didn't have to pack ALL the food we'd need. We basically had a bunch of snack options with us. Also, every place we were staying had laundry facilities. So everyone just packed three outfits and some pajamas for our 6 day trip.
We had everything ready and so we locked up the house, said a prayer, and then started driving. Our first stop was to drop off Marcia at the dog kennel. Any time away from Marcia is a vacation for me.
I took this picture in the parking lot of the kennel. It was 8:30 and we were on our way.
We got on Highway 93 and started driving south. Normally when we go on long car rides the kids watch movies on the built in TV/DVD player. We don't turn the movies on until we get to the "fast road" AKA the Interstate. We'd bought the complete series of Sabrina the Teenage Witch for this trip and the kids were excited to start watching it. They asked, "when do we get to the fast road." And I said, "Well this is actually the fastest road we'll be on for most of the day. They couldn't believe that we'd be driving on a two lane road for most of the trip. But they were relieved when I told them we'd still watch Sabrina even though we weren't on the real fast road.
We crossed the border into Nevada. The last time the kids were in Nevada was December of 2013 when Veronica was a baby. So none of them remember it.
This trip wasn't very memorable at this point either. The scenery was interesting, but a lot like Idaho.
The northern part of Nevada was also very cold. Look at all the snow on those mountains.
We stopped for a little bit at a Pony Express monument. But it was windy and cold so we didn't stay long.
Brandon liked this sign.
Our destination for the day was Las Vegas which was 8 hours away. I figured it was best to get our long day of driving out of the way on the first day when we were all still excited. I was also glad I'd made that plan when we stopped in Ely for lunch. It was only about 50 degrees outside. The weather was windy. And we'd only brought jackets on this trip. I was glad we weren't staying overnight in Ely this day.
Even though it was cold the kids were still excited to play on the playground at the park. They liked all these little toys. And check out that fire engine toy in the back ground. It's exactly like one the kids played on at their elementary school in Pocatello. They thought that was fun.
Here's what lunch looked like.
We got back into the car and started driving. We had two options for how to go south. One was to continue on Highway 93, the other was to go on highway 6 for a few miles and then south on State road 318. Since we'd come back up this way we decided to go on the 318 route today and the 93 route later in the week.
Here's what Highway 6 looked like before we turned off it.
This is what the inside of the car looked like. One of the nice things about the Honda is that each kid gets a window seat and space between each other.
Here's me.
Highway 318 was pretty long and boring.
Here's Brandon driving. He did such a good job.
We went through a little canyon with some interesting rocks.
And for a while these airplane contrails were the most interesting thing going on outside the car.
We rejoined Highway 93 and soon passed a reservoir or something. By this time the air was warmer and we were starting to pull our jackets off.
We'd been on highways for over 8 hours so when Highway 93 met up with I-15 for the last 30 or so miles into Las Vegas it felt a little weird.
But we all cheered when we went around a curve and could suddenly see Las Vegas.
Things got a little dicey when one of the kids announced they needed to use the bathroom. We were still about 25 minutes away from the place we were staying so it seemed like a good idea to get off the Interstate and find a bathroom.
But in reality it wasn't a good idea.
The exit we chose had a construction detour - with no gas stations on the detour. So then we had to loop back around. By the time we found a bathroom I was threatening that child with loss of water bottle privileges for every future trip in the car ever.
Then we had to get back onto the freeway and then crawl through stop and go traffic at the city center.
Finally we were off the Interstate and heading to the place we were staying.
So far I've been saying we were staying in hotels on this trip. But that's not exactly the case for while we were in Vegas.
In years past we've been able to squish our whole family into one hotel room. But we are passed those days. So when I was booking the trip I was looking for two hotel rooms that were hopefully adjoining. But two hotel rooms in Vegas was ridiculously expensive - even off the strip. I turned my attention to finding something like an air bnb. For some reason I decided to use the vrbo website instead of the airbnb website. I found a cute place that throughout the planning process and most of the trip we referred to as "The Vrbo." But in all reality it was a resort.
A beautiful resort.
We stayed at the Desert Paradise Resort by Diamond Resorts. It was about 2 miles away from the strip, and it was perfect.
Here's the main building where I checked in.
The buildings were all little condo type buildings. We were upstairs in building 15.
As soon as we opened the door we were all in awe. I tried to take pictures, but they do NOT capture how amazing this place was. Here's the kitchen.
The living room.
The laundry room.
This is the master bedroom with a king size bed and it's own bathroom. Charlotte and Lydia shared the other room with a queen size bed.
Here's the master bathroom. There was a slightly smaller bathroom off the living room.
The kitchen and living room were connected with a window and a bar.
Here's the dinning room area. We were all hungry for a snack so we had pudding and strawberries.
Then the kids and I put on our swimming suits and went to find the pool. We had to walk through this cute walkway between buildings.
And here's the pool. (I took this picture on another day in the morning before the pool opened. It usually had people in it.)
And the hot tub.
The kids swam for a long time. I got in with them and the water was pleasantly warm - even though it was after 5:00 and the sun was behind the buildings. I spent most of my time either in the hot tub or just sitting on a chair.
Here's Lydia in the hot tub.
Brandon just wanted a chance to do nothing and listen to the quiet after 8 hours of driving/listening to Sabrina. So he stayed in the hotel and rested. After about an hour he went to Burger King and picked up dinner. Knowing Brandon was back with food was the ONLY thing that got the kids out of the pool. We had them change into pajamas and then we had dinner.
After dinner we used the DVD player that was hooked up to the TV to watch our DVD copy of Oceans 11. Brandon and I love that movie and since it is set in Las Vegas we figured this was a good time to show the kids.
I had to explain A LOT of the movie to the kids - including the fact that this movie kind of had us rooting for the "bad guys." And the beginning was a little boring for the kids. But by the end they all liked it. Here they all are on the couch. About 2 minutes after we took this picture we pulled out the couch bed and all the kids laid on it.
The movie ended around 9:45 and everyone was very happy to go to bed. Derrick and Veronica shared the couch bed. Charlotte and Lydia were in the room with the queen size bed. And Brandon and I were in the master bedroom.
At some point that night I told Brandon. "If this is the type of vacation we can afford without student loans or a car payment, then maybe well never buy a bigger car."
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