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| My adorable hikers ready for adventure! |
We did a family RV thing! We’d been wanting to do an RV trip for a while, and finally made it happen this spring. We rented a motorhome from a private owner through Outdoorsy.com.
I grew up camping in a trailer (I’m spoiled, I know), but this was my first time in a motorhome and my first time camping where we were in charge of literally everything. :P
My favorite things about RVs:
- Accessible toilet anytime, anywhere! A great amenity especially with little ones and a pregnant woman, haha. You cannot beat the convenience of just popping off a seatbelt and going to do your thing, rather than having to parade the whole family into a gas station or fast food bathroom every time. (Or having to trek across a campground to the shared bathrooms when your little one is about to burst.)
- Being able to pop out of the passenger’s seat and help the kids if needed
- Fridge! We brought a ton of cold stuff on the trip, which gave us more options for meals, including cereal and milk for convenient breakfasts.
- Indoor sleeping space: spacious, quieter. And with a heater!
- Easily accessible water
My least favorite things about RVs:
- The gray water tank was only ⅓ full before it really started to smell. Mostly that means we’ll use the bathroom a lot less next time if camping without being connected to a dumping station.
- Motorhomes are super noisy when traveling.
- You are greatly limited in where you can park your RV. Most people use trucks or SUVs to pull trailers behind them, or tow a vehicle behind their bus-sized motorhomes, to give them a vehicle they can explore with without the extra size and load. But motorhomes are nice for families without good towing vehicles, like us.
Our Journey Begins: Staying at Southern Utah RV Resort in Washington, UT
Originally we were going to leave after Ariana’s school on a Friday and drive to Zion, but we realized after the fact that that week was her spring break, so we left on Thursday instead. We picked up the RV, loaded it, and got out later than expected (as is always the case) and arrived at Southern Utah RV Resort near St. George, an hour away from Zion, for the evening.
Unlike normal campsites, RV parks are quiet. Everyone does their talking and cooking inside. It was very nice.
On to Zion National Park
The tricky thing about Zion is that you need to reserve shuttle tickets to enter the park. We had tickets for Saturday, but not for Friday since we weren’t planning on being there until late Friday, originally. So at 5:00pm on Thursday night, Clayton reserved shuttle tickets for Friday also.
Clayton also reserved the campsite we were at (South Campground, no hook-ups) at exactly two weeks beforehand, when reserving was opened online for our selected date. He said all the available spots were taken within like 20 seconds of the reservations opening, so we were happy to get a spot. (We did have a spot reserved at an RV park beforehand that we cancelled once we got the South Campground spot.)
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| South Campground, Zion National Park |
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| Found a deer! We say many. I think they just grow up around campers |
So Friday morning, we needed to wake up, eat breakfast, drive to our Zion campsite, and make and pack a lunch before our shuttle window of 12:00-1:00. We barely made it (1:05) and then we were off into Zion!
Lower/Middle Emerald Pools Trail
This was mostly an easy trail, and beautiful with a lot to look at.
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| Heading to the Emerald Pools |
I was not expecting a waterfall at all, but that’s what we got! (The wind even shifted enough to briefly dump the fall right onto me and Levi. He did not like that.)
We continued up past the lower pool to the middle pool before heading back down. Going back down was tricky with young kids—I’m looking at you, Brielle and Levi—because they just did not have that same paranoia about walking close to the edge as we, their ever-protective parents, had. We had to remind them to not walk by the edge the whole way down. But we made it safely! Yay.
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| Find the lizard! |
We ate a super late lunch from our backpacks on the lawn of Zion Lodge. Even with a chilly wind nipping at our skin, we got ice cream right after, because that is just what one does after expending a ton of calories amongst rocks and dirt. Then we briefly visited the stop at Angel’s Landing before heading back to our campsite and calling it a day.
But the day wasn’t quite over, not with Revenge of the Allergies attacking Clayton's face. Sniffling like a madman, he suffered all through dinner and putting the kids to bed before knocking himself out with NyQuil.
How’d the pregnant lady do?
I was 31 weeks pregnant during this trip. I spent a lot of months in this pregnancy feeling quite blah in the mornings, thanks to my body fighting nausea with a medicine that made me extra sleepy. But the past couple weeks I had been waking up earlier and having a little more energy. That gave me hope that my body wasn't having to fight nausea as much anymore.
I did a lot better than I was expecting, especially my legs. I hiked like a semi truck, cruising along at the speed limit or five over until hitting a hill or stairs and dropping to twenty under. The blood in my legs would go down and struggle to go back up. But we had little children along, so there wasn’t anything too strenuous for me to survive.
The other issue I had was sitting down on hard places that weren’t at the right height for me to get back up easily, thanks to achy pregnant knees and tight piriformis muscles in my bum. But that’s what husbands are for, to help their pregnant wives get airborne again. 😄
At the end of the day (and trip), what hurt the most were my feet, shoulders, upper back, and that one dang bum muscle. I think my body really took advantage of sleeping for 10 hours each night in the RV bed (with my body pillow that Clayton gifted me for Christmas).
Riverside Walk
The second day, we had a later shuttle time again (1:00-2:00) that we’d chosen to keep rather than trying for an earlier time. It allowed us a relaxing morning before heading out on the shuttle. This time, we went to the last stop and onto a hike called Riverside Walk.
Riverside Walk was a much easier hike in that it was flatter, but unlike the Middle Emerald Pools Trail, it wasn’t a loop. So all the hikers who walked to the river and turned around—AND the hikers coming from a longer hike who waded through the river—were all walking opposite us on the same path. That meant, single file walking. And who doesn’t do single file walking all too well? Young children.
Brielle eventually picked up on it, but Levi? As soon as he saw something interesting, whether it be a squirrel or a cactus or water flowing out of the rocks (which there was quite a bit of), he lost all sense of where he was in location to anything else. I was constantly preventing him from getting run over. If something drew his attention across the path, he’d wander to that side every single time. If he spotted a particularly tempting stick on the ground, he’d stop abruptly to pick it up. One time when Levi stopped suddenly, I barely avoided hitting him and a guy walking close behind me barely avoided hitting me. After that instance I wanted to hang a sign on Levi’s back in gigantic letters that said:
WITH NO WARNING WHATSOEVER
But we made it to the river in the end. By then, it was later in the day so there weren’t as many hikers walking opposite us on the way back.
And that was Zion! ....the first time.
On to the Grand Grandeur of the Grand Canyon
The next day, we said good-bye to Zion and drove to an RV park called Trailer Village at the Grand Canyon. We made it there after the sun had set. By this time, the gray water tank in the RV was starting to smell something horrible. Clayton was nervous about hooking up to the dumping station in the dark, but the smell was unbearable, so he did and everything worked fine.
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| Trailer Village, Grand Canyon National Park |
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| Zion deer weren't the only wildlife used to people...meet Grand Canyon elk! |
When we got there, we discovered that the Visitor's Center and a lot of other indoor places were closed. So, that was a bummer.
Visitor's Center Route, Kaibab Rim Route (Yaki Point)
We first walked along part of the scenic route by the Visitor's Center.
The kids were a little cranky from the start. Here's the thing: Adult people come to the Grand Canyon to marvel at the unfathomable size and wonder of a huge chunk of earth shaped by natural forces years and years ago, and to lose ourselves in inspiration and awe.
Children come to play in the dirt. 😄 Sometimes there was too much walking and not enough dirt.
We ate lunch on a bench before hopping on a shuttle. Only 1 of 3 routes were running, and the shuttles were operating at less than 50%. That still gave us plenty to see, but hopping on a returning shuttle was kind of a pain. I think we waited in line for 20+ minutes the first time.
Hermit Road Route (Maricopa Point, hiked to Powell Point, then Hopi Point, shuttle to Mohave)
The next day, we took another route. This route couldn't be accessed from the Visitor's Center. We had to leave our campsite anyway, so we drove to an RV parking lot and walked to the shuttle stop. There we saw...more canyon!
It was all grand, except that it took 30+ minutes of waiting for a return shuttle to have enough room for us to get on once we were done.
Wahweap RV & Campground at Lake Powell
Once we made it back to our RV, we drove to an RV park at Lake Powell. We arrived in the evening and stayed the night.
The next day, we wanted to take the kids to the lake. There was a beach at Wahweap, but there was another one not too far away with sand called Lone Rock Beach, so we drove there. This place was basically a sand dune with water at the bottom.
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| View from the RV on top |
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| Me strolling down the dunes to the water |
Unfortunately, it was really windy. While the kids had a blast in the water, a strong wind gusted over the dunes towards the lake. Eventually the wind picked up and up until our poor kids were hunkering down, covering their faces. When it was apparent the wind wasn’t going to stop, we trekked back up the sandy slopes to our RV. Each step sunk heavily into the sand as we fought the hill and sand-filled wind buffeting us the whole way. We held the hands of our little children, directing them to close their eyes or look down, the whole way there. Oddly, Brielle and Levi didn’t complain, but poor Ariana had started whimpering the moment the wind started gusting. She was in tears by the time we reached the top. Once inside the RV, she asked if she could just cry. We said yes. Surprisingly, I think she only cried for five minutes.
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| My attempt to photograph how nasty that sandy wind was...it was way, way worse than this looks |
Our kids called it a sandstorm. It was a moment of major character building, to say the least.
Back to Zion—Zion River Resort RV Park & Campground
We had an extra day with the RV because the owner wasn’t going to pick it up until the evening of the next day, rather than the morning. So what to do with our extra time? We considered going to Bryce Canyon, but the high the next day was like 49 degrees. In fact, we soon discovered that everywhere up north was cooling down in a cold spell. The Wasatch Mountains were going to get snow. Nowhere was warmer than 50…
...except, like, St. George and Zion. So unexpectedly, we drove back through Zion and stayed at an RV park there. We took a few Zion pics along the way, visited a tourist place called Fort Zion, and then headed to our RV spot.
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| The kids came out of the RV and were like, ooh, this grass is so nice! Ariana got on her knees and ran her hands through it. |
The weather was mostly agreeable. We sat around the fire, then under the stars, on the last night of our trip.
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| Nothing like camping next to a resort with a pool and spa...haha |
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| This says it all... |
