Prelude to Our Trip in Utah National Parks

Me and my husband are not particularly people who plan a trip a few months in advance. We make impromptu plans one or two days or at the most a week in advance and go ahead with it. Most of our trips were chalked out at the last minute and we have always enjoyed such surprise tours. This trip that I am going to write about is not an exception either. My classes for MBA first semester came to an end on 4^th May and classes for summer semester were supposed to start from 16^th May. So in between, I had little more than 10 days of holidays to take advantage of. Though we desired to take a trip during my holidays, we didn’t start planning until 9^th May when my husband came home for lunch in the afternoon and told me that he wanted to go to Yellowstone National Park for three days. I told him to give me the afternoon for doing my research before confirming on Yellowstone. I did a small research on Google and realized that going to Yellowstone during spring break would not be wise as many parts of the park remain closed. Besides, the weather runs amok during spring. The weather forecast for Yellowstone exactly on the days we were planning to visit showed signs of rain showers. I didn’t want to take the pain of visiting a place when the chances of rain putting a damper on our trip were high. So we dropped the plan for Yellowstone. I zeroed in on choosing a location ideal for a visit this time of the year. So after an hour of deliberation, we decided on visiting the national parks in and around Utah. Utah with its desert climate is ideal for a visit during spring when the temperature hovers below 90 F. 

However, Utah has about a dozen beautiful national parks. Choosing a few out of them for our itinerary was not easy. Though both of us wanted to visit the Arches National Park, due to time constraint of only three days with a two year old toddler as company, we decided to travel only to those national parks located close to each other so that we would not have to spend much time on driving. My past travel experiences have taught me to plan an itinerary with less time spent on driving so that we could focus more on enjoying the trip and the surrounding beauty of the place visited. 

We decided to use Las Vegas as a stopover for our four day long trip, because firstly, it was the biggest airport close to the national parks we were visiting in southern Utah and secondly, Salt Lake City, the next biggest airport near to Utah’s national parks, was almost 6 hours driving distance from Zion National Park, which was one of the three national parks we planned to visit. So on 11^th May evening, we caught the 8 pm flight from Detroit and reached Las Vegas at around 9 pm (Nevada is three hours behind in time from Ohio). We reached Treasure Island hotel, our resting place for the night, at 11 p.m. Though we wanted to take a stroll down the Las Vegas strip at night, by the time the dinner was served in our room and we finished devouring the same, it was 12 a.m. Intending to preserve energy for the four hours long drive scheduled for the next day morning, we decided to retire to bed. However, the view of the strip from our hotel room was fascinating and I spent half an hour gazing at the splendor before calling it goodnight. 

If you have enjoyed the prelude, please don't forget to read about the next part of trip on Bryce Canyon.