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"The summer moon hung full in the sky. For the time being it was the great fact in the world." -Willa Cather

When I was younger, my family took a vacation to Lake Powell and we rented a houseboat. That was such a memorable trip for me that I’ve tried so many times to get back there and after what felt like a year I finally convinced my friends to go! I originally wanted to do this trip for my birthday, but there was a series of unfortunate events happening and it didn’t work out. After Brooke came out to spend my birthday weekend with me in Joshua Tree, she had gotten bitten by the “Nature Bug” and was ready to go on the next adventure with us. She booked her flight for a Thursday night so we left early Friday morning. I had mapped out the trip and all of the places we’d stop and really put some time into planning, like how long it would take us to get to each place, stops along the way, etc. We woke up at 3:30am to start showering and getting ready to leave because LA traffic any later than that would’ve really gotten us off to a slow start. We left right at 5, which was the time that Starbucks opened so that worked out perfectly. Our first stop was Seven Magic Mountains, which is an art installation right outside of Las Vegas. There really isn’t much to it, basically a bunch of colored rocks stacked on top of each other, but it makes for really cute pictures ;) We were there by 8:30 so we were making really good time!

From there we were going to Zion National Park and we would lose an hour once we got into Utah. I’ve never driven on the east side of Las Vegas, and the drive alone was beautiful! We had gotten to Zion around 1pm and stopped at a Deli right outside the park for lunch. A bit of advice for anyone traveling to National Parks and planning on going to more than one park in a year of time, BUY THE AMERICA IS BEAUTIFUL park pass. It’s only $80 and will save you a bunch of money, as every park we went to on this trip was free because I bought one back in May. It’s a $30 fee for each park if you don’t, so just bite the bullet and spend the extra $50, it is well worth it! It was my first time to Zion, and we really didn’t do much exploring off of the main road but it was incredible! There’s a part where you drive through this tunnel and when you come out on the other side the landscape is pretty different and makes you kinda feel like you’re in another park. I definitely want to go back to Zion and spend some more time there since there is like an entire half that you can only get to by park buses, but I was still glad to have gotten to see it that day!

Once we drove through the park and saw everything that we could by personal car, we headed to Page, AZ which is where our hotel was for the weekend. Page was only about an hour and a half from Zion and on the way we had gotten a Flash Flood Warning on our cell phones. Now being that we are all Southern girls, who are used to the rain and never see any in LA, we actually got excited about it. We even took it as far as creating a rain playlist on Spotify with a bunch of songs about rain and played it hoping to come across a good thunderstorm. Brooke still lives in New Orleans and gets rain all the time, so she wasn’t as hopeful as we were :P Once we got into Page, we went straight to Horseshoe Bend. Horseshoe Bend is basically where the Colorado River curves in the shape of a Horseshoe. It is a massive view and really cool to see because your looking at it from above. My mom actually thought that I was sending her pictures from an airplane because the view is so high up. She wasn’t as happy to know that I was actually sending pictures from sitting on the ledge of it, but I had to do it from the gram ;) It was super windy and pretty nerve racking but it also gave me an adrenaline rush! There are parts of the viewing area where there are guard rails but that was just in the way. One thing that I must say about Page, is there are a lot of tourists there. And when I say tourists, I mean like international tourists. So, when finding someone to take your picture there was usually a bit of a language barrier and there was also an age barrier. This one lady offered to take a picture of the 4 of us, but she was a little older, and in her defense it was really bright out there and hard to see the phone screen to see what you were taking a picture of. With that being said, we did not get one single picture of the 4 of us without her finger covering half of the picture! We tried to tell her when we turned around and noticed her finger over the lens.. But again, language barrier. There was also this nice little girl who offered to take our picture but she just completely cut Casie out of the picture. *facepalm* So we settled for a selfie to capture the 4 of us at Horseshoe Bend. No cute background, but we knew where we were.

After we finished up at Horseshoe Bend, we went back to our hotel to check in and shower before we decided on dinner somewhere. We stayed at the Travelodge in Page and when we got there to check in, there was a sign that was sitting on the counter that said nothing more than “Be Back Later.” There was no time when someone would be back, and there were a bunch of other people waiting to also check in, so as sweaty and disgusting as we were, we had no choice but to just go to dinner. We found a pizza place nearby and sat outside as we started to plan what to do on Saturday. We wanted to do Antelope Canyon and as someone who’s never been, I knew that you had to book a tour to see it, but that was all I knew. We started looking at the different tours online and quickly realized they were all booked. And not just booked for that day, but completely booked through the end of September. So if you’re reading this and trying to book a trip to see Antelope Canyon, BOOK IT MONTHS IN ADVANCE! Once we realized that we figured we could just rent jet skis for Saturday and spend the day on the water. All jet skis (that were in our price range) were booked too. Great. We were pretty exhausted from that day so we just went back to the hotel and decided to figure it out in the morning. The hotel situation was kind of a nightmare. I booked it through expedia so we couldn’t change the nights we wanted to stay and once they found out there were more than 2 people, they started just tacking fees on to the total. But I guess they are usually dealing with tourists and are pretty ruthless about these things. Once we woke up Saturday morning, we just started calling places and see if they had any available tour times that weren’t listed online. THANK GOD we found a tour through Dixie Tours at Lower Antelope Canyon for Sunday morning at 8:45 and we were able to go! We also found jet skis that were available for Sunday and went ahead and booked those as well. So we had the day for Saturday completely open, so we packed an ice chest and went to Wahweap Marina and spent the day on the beach there. Again, the America is Beautiful pass got us in for free. Our goal for that day was to find someone to invite us out on their boat as the boat launch was right next to where the swimming beach was, but that was unsuccessful. It was still a really fun day even though we really didn’t do much of anything other than swim and sit on the beach. The weather was really pretty and just being on Lake Powell alone is beautiful! That evening it did start to rain a little bit, so we cleaned up after ourselves and went back to our hotel. The sunset that evening was SO pretty because you could look out and see all of the different rain storms happening around us.

Sunday was by far the best day- we woke up early that morning and went to Antelope Canyon for our tour and it was BEAUTIFUL! Antelope was another first for me, so I really didn’t know what to expect. Whenever you go into the Canyon, you go about 120 feet underground and walk through it. It’s really cool to see how the sun creates the shadows and makes all the walls look really cool. I was glad that we went in to the morning because being in the canyon was HOT. There was no cool breeze and was basically just trapped heat. The tour was about an hour once you got into the canyon so it was doable.

After we finished our tour, we grabbed a bite to eat and went and got our jetskis. We rented 2 jet skis from Carl’s Marina, which was the cheapest at $175 a jetski. They even towed them to the lake for us since we didn’t have a towing car, nor did we know how to launch them in the water. Backing a trailer up is a little out of my comfort zone. All of the rental places that are on the lake already are about double the price, so renting from a place that wasn’t on the lake saved us some money. It was a $50 towing fee, but it was still much cheaper. Once we were on the water we had SO MUCH FUN! Lake Powell is huge and to avoid getting lost, we didn’t venture too far from where we launched. We launched at Antelope Point Marina and again got to launch for free because of the America is Beautiful pass (i’m telling y’all it is SO worth it!) The guy who rented the jet skis from gave us a map of the lake and showed us where we could find a beach to hang out on. We stayed on the main part of the lake and only went in to Navajo Canyon which is where the beach was. The water at Lake Powell is so clear and blue and you could see straight down for a little ways. We would stop to swim around for bit and stayed on the beach for about 2 hours. By the time the day was over we were BURNT! Mostly our faces, but the tops of our legs and shoulders were a little red too.

On Monday morning we got up and started our drive to the Grand Canyon (again, free entry). The drive to the South Rim was about 2 hours from Page. The North Rim was closed whenever we went due to fires, which you can see in the back of all of our pictures. I had been to the Grand Canyon twice before, once when I was younger I went with my family and again when KT and I made the drive when moving to LA. We spent a couple of hours there and again found our way around the guardrails and kind of walked out a bit into the Grand Canyon. From there we started our drive back to LA which was only about 6 or 7 hours by the time we stopped and ate and all that. It was definitely one of the best weekends of my life and I can easily say that Lake Powell is one of my favorite places to visit and I cannot wait to go back!!

xo

charli