Please give us some pointers for our South-West USA road trip and tell us we're not crazy...

In My Humble Opinion
1

Hello, Dopers!

I haven’t posted in a while, but now I’m hoping that the teeming millions of Americans on the board can maybe give me a hint or two:

My fiancee and I (both from Germany, in case that matters) are planning a two-week road trip from San Francisco to Los Angeles for our honeymoon this summer (late July, early August), and the itinerary we’ve come up with is… ambitious, to say the least. I’d love to hear what you think and if it’s not only that, but completely, utterly batshit crazy. So here it is, broken down:

Day 1 - arrive at SFO at 2pm. Enjoy the city

Day 2 - tour San Francisco

Day 3 - get a car, go to Yosemite Village, have a look around

Day 4 - hike to Glacier Point, leave Yosemite to the east, stay somewhere (big question mark number one)

Day 5 - continue into Las Vegas, enjoy the city

Day 6 - leave that den of sin for Zion, stay somewhere

Day 7 - continue to Bryce Canyon, maybe stay there

Day 8 - (this one’s crazy, maybe…) tour Bryce Canyon, Arches National Park, Monument Valley, stay somewhere (big question mark number two)

Day 9 - Antelope Canyon, take a photo at Horseshoe Bend, go to Grand Canyon Village

Day 10 - hike down (yay!)

Day 11 - hike up (nooooooo!)

Day 12 - go to Las Vegas again, sleep in a proper bed

Day 13 - go to Los Angeles, spend the evening

Day 14 - Six Flags Magic Mountain (non-negotiable!)

Day 15 - spend the morning in LA, leave LAX at 6pm
So, there you go. Our two specific questions:

  1. Can you recommend somewhere to stay/to go between Yosemite and Las Vegas? Going there directly on the same day we did a major hike doesn’t feel like a smart idea.

  2. We’re unsure where to rest between Monument Valley and Antelope Canyon. Looking at the map we don’t see any obvious spots. Should we just get some motel by the side of the road (if there is one?) or can you think of an actual destination?

Thank you for any and all input. None of this is cast in stone yet, so we’re open for suggestions to drop or add stuff.

2

Isn’t Horseshoe Bend near the north rim? See the dam at Page. See the North Rim if it is open and hike down and up from there. Skip Grand Canyon Village.

We once spent two or three weeks a year at the Utah places you mentioned. I don’t think the decades have created too much distraction.

Been too long. I cannot help with lodging but doesn’t Google now have all those places flagged?

3

Thank you, janeslogin. Great suggestion about the North Rim, we’ll check that out. The reason we’re asking about where to stay is we’re not even sure where to break up the trip at those points - we could go two or three hours in this or the other direction, depending on if there’s anything worthwhile staying at/looking for.

Something I forgot: one thing that is obviously missing from our itinerary is the great Route 1 from San Francisco to LA, but due to the closing of the road at Big Sur that road has lost a lot of its appeal and we decided to just skip this one day of driving and split the airports instead.

4

BTW, this is the Horseshoe Bend I was talking about, right next to Antelope Canyon. We didn’t plan on spending time in Grand Canyon Village, that would just be our base to take the South Kaibab Trail down and the Bright Angel Trail up. It looks like the North Rim would take us a lot out of our way, are those trails a lot better than those two?

5

My only recommendation is that things in that part of the world are very far apart.

Take time on a mapping app to figure out the exact routes and travel times. At first glance, some of your days look like you’ll be driving for 29 hours to get from here to there to there to there. I would also highly recommend figuring out your nightly stops and making reservations. Some of your ideas look like you are going to be in the middle of no-f*cking-where, there would be limit accommodations and the likelihood of walking in cold and getting a room are suspect.

6

Look at the drop-off fee for your car;

We did something similar and in retrospect I could have saved a lot of money by driving the car back myself.

7

Yes, we do appreciate that. We mapped the whole trip out and it seems juuuuuust manageable, even though I’ll be the only one driving. We tried not to have more than 5 or 6 hours of just driving at a time. To your point of being in the middle of no-where - that’s exactly why we’re asking if there’s a somewhere close by. In any case, making reservations beforehand does seem like the smart thing to do.

Our travel agency seems to have a deal with Alamo where they waive the one-way fee within California. We’ll probably pay around 350$ a week for our car, which seems reasonable.

8

What Icarus said. With your itinerary you are going to spend an enormous amount of time driving through featureless desert. Very HOT featureless desert from horizon to horizon, for hours and hours and hours. I’ve done it many times myself, but it isn’t anything I ever look forward to.

I’ve been told that this is the #1 mistake visitors from Europe make when they visit the western US.

If it was me, I would think very hard about how many vacation days I want to spend in a droning metal box versus being someplace.

9

I don’t think you can make days 8 & 9 work.

A few years ago I went to the national parks in Utah. For each I got there in the afternoon - saw a few things, hiked a little, stayed overnight, and then did a very short hike/look around in the morning and headed to the next park. It was very rushed, but possible as I stayed late and started early. Ideally, I’d have taken a few more days.

If you want to do more than just having driven near the sites (like getting out of the car, walking up close to some of the arches for which the park is named), it’s going to take more time than that.

Also, if you’re not used to several days of long drives - it’s tougher than you think it will be to do that.

10

Seriously, you’re trying to cram way too much into two weeks. 11 years ago, I spent six weeks hiking through the National Parks of Utah and Arizona, and only left those two states once, to visit Mesa Verde. Do you really plan to see Bryce, Arches, and Monument Valley in one day (and don’t you want to add Capitol Reef, Painted Desert And Canyonlands along the way, not to mention Horseshoe Canyon)?

The thing is, there’s no such thing as “driving to a place, checking it out, then going somewhere else.” Many of these places, like the National Parks, require you to get out of the car and hike, sometimes a long distance, to see what there is to see. That takes time and energy. You can’t just drive to Bryce or Arches, snap a few pics and check it off your list.

Visiting these places requires a certain amount of stamina, which you’re not going to have after doing so much driving. My recommendation is to forget California and Nevada, and concentrate on Utah and Arizona. Make the trip more intensive, rather than extensive.

11

You’re crazy.

I’m Australian but I live in California. I KNOW about long distance driving. Don’t do it.

Fly into SF, and spend some time there - it really depends what you’re interested in seeing. Nature? Point Reyes, Muir Woods, South to Half Moon Bay on Hwy 1… all VERY close. Amazing restaurants. City sightseeing.

Then fly to Vegas, rent a car, pick one or two desert parks to explore, and EXPLORE them. Stay a few nights.

Fly to LAX or Burbank, rent a car, do LA stuff. Fly home.

If I wanted to hit all of your sights on a specific road trip vacation, I’d take at least a month to do it. It’s miserable to roll into town at midnight, collapse in Motel 6 for a few hours, only be on the road again so keep on schedule. What if you find a spot you really love and want to spend an extra day there? What if you take a wrong turn out hiking and spend an unexpected three hours up a mountain? And with only one of you driving… eesh.

Can you tell us your motivations for this trip? Is it really just, squeeze in as much sight seeing as possible?

12

Thank you all for your caveats. I did have the feeling we were a bit optimistic, we’ll have to see where we can make some cuts. I know that I could spend two weeks touring every one of those places on their own, but, alas, this is all the time we have.

Of all those parks, I have only really visited Grand Canyon (did the hike down and up in 2009), and sort of “driven through” Zion and Yosemite. Looks like we have some hard choices ahead. Thank you, panache45 about your “checking off” comment, that is really not what we want. While I know intellectually that this is all really far, it looks like we were falling victim to that European mistake.

Oh, BTW, Horseshoe Bend has, AFAICT, nothing to do with Horseshoe Canyon, UT. It’s just a bend in the Colorado River that is literally right next door to Antelope Canyon.

13

Well, I’ve done a similar trip before, in a similar timeframe. It was fun, and all of these sights/parks were places that came highly recommended. While I realize this is all a bit ambitious, I do stand by our general plan - as I said, no day has more than 5 or six hours of driving, with exceptions.

14

What everyone else said, plus another reminder about the heat. The desert in August is not meant for human activity. It will be oppressive, unbearable, and can be very dangerous, especially while hiking.

15

Um, yeah. That’s an all-day hike (assuming you’re in really good shape), followed by an all-day drive. Stay an extra night in Yosemite, and save the drive for the next day.

16

You’re hitting a lot of great places I worry that you’re going too fast and you could easily spend a week for each day you have listed. Also if you’ve got your heart on Vegas that is fine however Reno is closer to Yosemite.

17

Right. I’ve been to both, and came close to actually dying in Horseshoe Canyon. I don’t recommend it for someone as inexperienced - and old - as I was. (It’s the place where Aron Ralston had to cut off his own arm.)

And another thing about the heat: the farther down you go, the hotter. When I was down in Horseshoe Canyon, it was a blistering 123ºF, and damn little shade.

18

This. Full stop. Underlined for emphasis.

You are coming in late July. Do you have any idea how hot it is going to be?

Cut that list in half. Either stay in the north or the south - don’t try to do both. As others have stated, most of the places on your list require multiple day stays. If all you do is drive in (arriving in the afternoon), spend the night, then leave you might as well save the money and stay home.

19

You’re nuts.

Visiting some of the most spectacular places in the South West, arriving around noon to spend an active afternoon in the hot sun, spending the night and moving on to the next place is a waste of your time. I think any of the places you mentioned you should try to spend a full day (wake up and go to sleep in the same bed). If you follow the schedule you’ve laid out in the summer heat you’ll be exhausted all the time and will need rest days above and beyond the travel.

Do you have reservations at Phantom Ranch?

20

For our Honeymoon, my husband and I took a roadtrip with our dogs. I think we knew we were meant for each other when we both said at the same time “I want to take the dogs!”

We flew to Indiana, spent the night with relatives, then took a borrowed car (it had been my car when I lived in Indiana) from them, drove out west, saw the Hot Springs in Arkansas, some relatives I had not seen for a long time in Kansas, my grandfather’s grave in Kansas, an old friend who was terminally ill (my son is named for him) in Texas, and some relatives of my husband’s who hadn’t been able to make the wedding, and then the petrified forest, the old Pueblos, and the Grand Canyon.

Just so you know, driving itself can make you exhausted. We drove 24 hours straight at one point, taking turns, and sleeping and it was exhausting. We had intended to do a lot of camping, but we ended up mostly in motels, because the driving was more tiring than we thought it would be (and the motels were more pet-friendly than we thought they’d be).

We didn’t hike down, because we had the dogs, although there was a place to board them, so people who had pets and wanted to make the hike could do so. You have to camp overnight at the bottom, because you can’t do both in one day.

However, you can ride mules to the bottom, and back, and I think you can do that in one day. We were there in March, and it was chilly, but the sun was still very bright, and it was possible to get a sunburn in this part of the country even when it wasn’t very hot. In the middle of the summer, it is going to be dangerously hot at the bottom. You might want to go for the option of the mules, or just give up seeing the bottom. I’m here to tell you it is amazing even without seeing the bottom.

If you cut back on other things, but still go to the canyon, the Petrified Forest is nearby, and a short hike, and also amazing.

Do you really want to go to Six Flags when you will be so close to Disneyland? Six Flags is cool, but Disneyland is the original theme park. Also, I’m pretty sure Magic Mountain is at Disneyland, so maybe that’s what you meant.

If I had to pick one thing to cut, it’d be Vegas. You want to see lots of natural formations that are only in the US, plus Disneyland/Six Flags, and theme parks are really an American phenomenon. Gambling casinos are not American, and you can always go to one of the much classier European ones than Vegas, which is the height of tack.

Confession: I was in Vegas as a small child. It was loud and smelly and I hated it. I also hate gambling. I was permitted inside some parts of the casino back then (I think the laws have changed), but it looked awful. Nothing I have heard from people who have been there has changed my mind.

Exception: if Penn & Teller are playing in Vegas, go see them. There is nothing typically American about them, but they are wonderful. I’ve seen them live twice.

ALSO, AND THIS IS IMPORTANT: are you over 25? Many car places will not rent to people under 25. At least one of you will need to be 25 or over. And you’ll need to get an international driver’s license, and a major credit card that is valid in the US and has at least $500 free on it. They will not take cash as a deposit. Also, they may not release your deposit immediately, so if you want to drop off a car in one place, and rent another two days later, the deposit may not yet be released.

You should book the car online to get the best price, but then call the actual place on the phone to make sure you will be eligible and have everything you need.