Roadtrip Part 1: The Las Vegas Disaster

I'm back from my much-anticipated southwestern roadtrip! It was basically awesome. We (myself, my sister, and our best bud Stanley) spent 10 days visiting Las Vegas, Bryce National Park, Zion National Park, the Grand Canyon, and Sedona. We squeezed quite a bit into those 10 days and have great memories to take away from it!

I'll start at the beginning in this post, which was the lamest part of the trip: Las Vegas.

We had planned to do a quick one-night stopover in Vegas on the way to Utah so we could break up the driving a bit. We left bright dark and early after packing up the car to the very brink of capacity. Literally, there was not an extra square inch of space left by the time the three of us crammed ourselves inside (and that's pretty much how it remained for the entire 10 days of driving. I don't know how we ended up with so much stuff).

Pardon our 5am grossness.

After a cramped 9 hour car ride, we figured we'd get into Vegas early, have an afternoon and evening to walk around, maybe relax by the pool, have a nice dinner, and go to bed early. However, things don't always go as planned, do they? Car trouble put an end to that idea. We had a major malfunction about 30 miles outside of Vegas, and instead of relaxing and enjoying the afternoon, we spent hours sitting and waiting at a sweltering gas station and then in a repair shop waiting room.

I'd complain, but Stanley won $200 at the gas station penny slot machine in the process. That helped make up for the day's frustrations!

By that evening we were finally patched up and ready to get on with our trip. We checked into our hotel (the Vdara) and quickly met Stanley's cousin at the Burger Bar in Mandalay Bay for dinner (which was decent). At around 11 we returned to the hotel all set to go to bed so we could wake up nice and early, only to find one of the beds didn't have any bedding. And there was an hour wait (which ended up being an hour and 20 minutes) to receive bedding. What the heck?! Don't stay at the Vdara. Lame.

We woke up kind of grumpy from our Vegas experience and were excited to get on the road again and make our way to Utah. After a pretty drive with lots of great scenery, we were all once again happy and excited, and ready to do some camping! Bryce coming up in the next entry...