Trillcation: Utah To Colorado 2020 Day 1
Monday, August 24 (PST):
8:30 PM (CST): Depart Dallas/Ft Worth International Airport
9:30 PM – Arrive at Las Vegas Airport/Pick Up Rental Car
1:00 AM – Arrive at Lunt Park Northbound Rest Area/Sleep in Car
So let’s talk about how this all started. Zach’s dad was the architect for a vacation home in Estes Park, so the owners offer him the house once a year for a family vacation. The first year was 2018, which we attended. We skipped last year because we had just purchased a house and needed to save our coins. Flash forward to 2020 and one of the dates fell on my birthday, so we were up for it. The dates were confirmed in February, right after we returned from a two weeks trip to Vietnam. That trip provided a lot of credit card points and we were amped to plan another trip because that’s really the only way to cure the post vacation blues. At the time, the Coronavirus was more serious overseas than it was Stateside and Zach and I both had full time jobs, so we figured why not plan the damn trip.
We had also used up all of our 2020 vacation hours already, so we knew it was even more of a stretch to go a full week so technically we made it 5 work days with a late flight out Monday night. Just wanted to point that out for those of you who still have full time jobs and want to squeeze in a lot in a short amount of time.
I am not a believer of going to the same place over and over again and the only way I can justify a repeat visit is if the trip doesn’t center around the repeat destination. To be honest, I cannot honestly remember why we chose the locations that we did besides the fact that one of our first trips together started with a flight to Vegas and we took ourselves to Zion National Park, Page, Arizona (Antelope Canyon and Horseshoe Bend), and Grand Canyon National Park. And it was, to this day, one of the best trips we ever took together. We know we like Utah and flights to Vegas from DFW are always pretty cheap, so it was a no brainer.
Flying into Vegas and flying out of Denver were the only things we knew were set in stone, so we booked those flights immediately before determining anything else.
Once I settled on Bryce Canyon National Park, I started looking up hotels and immediately realized that there were not a lot of options and they were priced pretty high. All averaging around the $200/night mark, so I knew I should just suck it up and book it sooner rather than later. Which I did through Expedia because there’s no upfront charge and you just pay upon checkout. A lot of our travel decisions start out with what’s the best bang for our buck, and how much money can we save. Oh, and we like to accomplish as much as possible during our time.
We knew we had to head East from Vegas, and Southern Utah is filled with National Parks so this would be the optimal choice for our journey to Estes Park. With Bryce Canyon being 4 hours away from Vegas, and realizing our arrival time, I thought it would be a complete waste to book a hotel for our first night. I figured we could just drive into the park (most National Parks are open 24 hours) and sleep on a blanket outside or something. Zach was not up for that idea, but we both agreed a hotel was unnecessary so we met in the middle and settled on sleeping in the car at a rest stop.
So we folded down the seats in our rental (I highly recommend a midsize SUV for these kinds of road trips even if there are only two people) and kind of slept. It was a lot of shifting around and waking up and then going back to sleep but we only had to endure that for three hours before waking up to hit the road again. Going from Vegas to Utah, we lost an hour but as long as you know what time you need to wake up, you barely feel it. After changing and freshening up a bit at the rest stop, we headed to Bryce Canyon which was an hour from the rest stop.