Utah & Arizona 2023

After the first truck failure on the first attempted RV weekend trip, you’d think that would be the last trouble our NEW truck would have given us, but of course now. After a longer first day drive to get underway on our first extended RV trip, we started our day 2 full of hope and dreams… only to have the radiator fluid warning light come on. After spending a lovely 10 days in Waterloo NY at the KOA and surrounding attractions including the awesome pizza place in the middle of town (and lots of angry phone calls about the truck), we had a new radiator and back on the road. We had to condense our drive days down a lot and skip through Colorado quickly, but we caught up to our original itinerary at Bryce Canyon. We made it to our 10 day Zion campsite booking and did all the top things like Angel’s landing (AJ and Jordan turned back at Scout’s overlook), the Narrows (turned back before going in past our knees), and biking the scenic drive through the canyon, before getting Covid for the first time ever which consumed the second half of the stay. We blame the shuttle since it was the only place we were near people. AJ was able to extend her time off from work for another week which allowed us to re-route the trip down to the Grand Canyon and the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta, which was a major highlight! We were up at 4am or so and on the field just as the dawn patrol balloons were going up, returning to the RV for the middle of the day, and back out in the evening for a the special shapes balloon glow and fireworks. One word of advice from the trip home where we stopped at Mammoth Cave - 2.5 year olds that like to climb everything do not take it well when they aren’t allowed to climb on the rocks. They will scream. They won’t stop. You will regret it. 

In the end, the truck breakdown at the beginning of the trip felt like it was ruining the entire trip and that we would have to go home, but it all worked out in the end and we still had a great trip. Waterloo was close to AJ’s hometown so we were able to transfer excess weight items out of the RV as we discovered we were close to max weight and wouldn’t be able to safely travel with much water (learning curve). Also, despite booking almost every night of the trip, changing things up on the fly wasn’t that big of a deal and we lost minimal amounts of money in cancellation fees.