Arizona National Parks Day 3

Day 3 – March 13, 2017

We got up this morning, ate breakfast and hit the road.  Our first planned stop was Meteor Crater, outside of Flagstaff but as we were taking the 6 mi road south off of I-40, I read a review that said it’s a total rip off – it’s privately owned at $18pp for adults and $16pp for kids.  So after passing some cute calves and cows, we turned around in the parking lot and headed back to the main road.

We turned north towards Page, AZ and stopped off at Sunset Crater National Monument.  It was a great surprise.  We took the Lava Flow Trail (about 1 mi). 

The trail was cool and the weather was perfect.  We kept driving east and followed the road up to the Wupatki Ruins National Monument.  Behind the visitor center were some amazing ruins and I was surprised at how much the kids seemed to enjoy them. 

These monuments were well worth the detour but they did get us into Page later than we’d planned which meant we were all starving and grumpy.  We stopped for lunch at the River’s End Café but the food was too fru fru for Ryan and it was connected to an outdoors store so Nick spent some time buying a hat.  We then drove to the Dam Bar & Grill and had a good but slow lunch.  Ahhhh…much better with food in my belly.

From there we headed North on 89 and stopped to see the Glen Canyon Dam and Bridge.  There’s a cool visitor center there with great info and great views of the Damn and Lake Powell.

We drove a bit north from there and crossed into Utah just so that the kids could say they’d been in Utah.  That’s their 20^th state!

From there we headed back south, stopping at and hiking back to Horseshoe Bend.  Magnificent

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It’s one of the picture on your U-verse TV when your TV’s on but not on.  This was the best part of the trip for me by a mile.  

Ry and I hiked an extra little ways to get even higher up and it was just cool. 

We counted 20 different states on the license plates of the cars in the parking lot.  The kids only have 18 more states to go and we haven’t even gone to the Grand Canyon yet!

Around 5pm we checked into our very nice Comfort Inn & Suites and lucky for us we’re one of the Suites in the Inn & Suites – nice one-bedroom room with a balcony.  The kids are in heaven because we’re…wait for it… staying here for 2 nights!!  They’ve found the indoor pool and the vending machine so life is perfect right now in the eyes of my 9 and 11-year-olds. J

After a short swim and sit in the hot tub, we went to dinner at Strombolli’s – long wait but pretty good!  Between Ryan and Grant, they knocked over a water and that ended the night on a low note as everyone got mad at everyone so we went home and were all in bed by 9:30.