A Grand Adventure - the planning and day 1

The day you leave for a big trip is always full of excitement and, in many cases, nervousness.  This year the Pranskys and the Halls had taken on our most ambitious camping trip to date - one with a lot of moving parts. 

The planning for this whole adventure all started when we asked the kids where they'd really like to go that we haven't been yet.  The kids are going into their senior year, and we knew that our family trips together were going to be winding down and becoming less frequent as they go to college, start working, have families, etc...  
 

Over the years, we've narrowed down the bucket list of places to see a lot.  Our camping trips have taken us to Traverse City, MI, Savannah, GA, Fort Desoto, FL, the Smokey Mountains, Rocky Mountain National Park, Acadia, ME, the Adirondacks of New York,  the White and Green Mountains in New Hampshire and Vermont, Custar State Park in South Dakota, and the Tetons and Yellowstone in Wyoming. That's just off the top of my head.  I'm sure I missed a few.
 

Rogan didn't really have an opinion about where to go, but Mikah has said for awhile that she really wanted to see the Grand Canyon.  So, I started planning the trip like I usually do - by going to google maps.  Yikes!  29 hours and 1,900 each way.  That's a long way to pull our pop-up camper!

Driving there seemed to be out of the picture.  We'd lose 4-8 days of the trip just driving out depending on how long we were willing to drive.  

Okay, time for Plan B.  Many people fly to Phoenix or Las Vegas. Vegas seemed like the best option because it is relatively cheap to fly there (<$400/person) and its often very cheap to stay there for a night of two (The rooms we booked at the Luxor were $39/night)  Plus, its Vegas, baby! Anything we spend, we can make back at the casino, right?

From there we could rent a vehicle that we could camp in and see as many of the sites around the Grand Canyon that we could.  Here was our map of what we wanted to see on the trip using the awesome Roadtrippers website/app.

 

Click image above to see more detail of our trip in Roadtrippers

In all, we'd cover around 1,200 miles driving this loop around the canyon.  My first thought was to rent an RV from Cruise America RV's.  We saw tons of these around Yellowstone.

It was not a bad option, but to get one that sleeps 4, you'd have to get a big one and we knew they would be hard to park or go out to eat anywhere.  Plus, they were also pretty expensive.  

Next we looked at the Jucy van.  It has a pretty cool modification to a  Dodge Caravan that allows two people to sleep on top and two to sleep inside.

 

It also had a small kitchenette in the back with a gas-powered Coleman stove and a mini fridge that worked off of solar power.  Again, this was a decent option, but this is not what we settled on. 

Ultimately, we decided to go with Escape Campervan.  These were our Escape Campervans that we slept and traveled in for 8 days.

The set-up of the vans is similar to the Jucy van except with a bit more storage space for your bags behind the bench seats in the back.  Each Escape van is individually painted with a range of wild designs.  Ours were named "Fish Tank" and "Dogtown."  (Dogtown is a nod to the birth of skateboarding.)

We were hoping for a cool design like one of these:

Instead we got this:

 

A bystander at some point asked if it was "Saved by the Bell" themed. It definitely had a distinctive 80's feel to it.

  Here's a video showing a walk through of some parts of the van:

If our trip had a theme song it would have to be "On the Road Again." This is not the Willie Nelson tune of the same name but the lesser known yet still recognizable tune by a band called Canned Heat.  This song was appropriate for some obvious reasons and some not.  First of all, for some random reason we heard this song 3 times on our trip.  The weird falsetto tone of the singer stumped Greg and I as to who sang it.  When we found out they were called Canned Heat that seemed appropriate as we cruised the west in a "can" of sorts in temperatures that were in the triple digits daily and reached as high 117º.  

Apparently we were trapped in what meteorologists call a "heat dome."

The temperatures in Vegas the week we left.

One of the nerve wracking parts to planning this trip was, would these camper vans work for us?  The answer was, a definitive "yes."  Most importantly, they were dependable for us as we drove 1,200 miles.  Where we drove you did NOT want to have engine or tire trouble because in most cases there was nothing around for 40 or 50 miles and the temperature was in the triple digits.  

The vans got decent mileage, maybe around 18 mpg, and had a huge gas tank.  This was important because when you did find a "town," it was often very limited in what it offered in terms of food or gas, if they did at all.  Importantly, the escape vans had a decent amount of space for our bags inside.  This was one of the reasons we chose them over the Jucy vans, and I think we were all glad we did.  The beds themselves were pretty comfortable, all in all.  Now, the temperature swings at night, that was another story (to be told later.)

Day 1 - Monday 

We flew into Vegas with the maximum that we could pack and carry while still only checking one bag.  We knew space in the van would be limited, but we also had to pack for almost 2 weeks.  We also knew to be prepared for extreme temperature swings each day.  We took an Uber from the airport to the Luxor.  (Greg texted us to on the way, "Just tell the driver to turn left at the obelisk.")

Jen had checked us in online so we just picked up our keys and went up to the room.  The room was nothing special, but we didn't care.  We did discover they have a major problem with unreachable dust on the other side of the glass outside of our room.

 

EW!

Since the kids had never been to Vegas, we decided to walk around the hotel and the strip to see some of the "sights."

We took some pics outside the hotel on the way to the tram.

We saw guys cleaning the windows of the hotel.

That job does NOT look fun.

We watched the fountains at the Bellagio hotel and observed some of the oddities that come with people hanging out on the strip.

Greg's comment: "Crippled Elvis is my favorite Elvis"

We decided to eat at a place called Bruxies where most of us had chicken and waffle meals. While there we watched some of the NBA finals as the Warriors defeated the Cavs to win it all.  From there, we went back to Luxor to call it a night.  Tomorrow the real adventure begins.