Another Summer, Another Epic road trip in the books.
Holy crap this is my last day at the road trip. Well it's taking me absolutely forever to finish off this series of posts it's also a little depressing. Not to mention that it was both exciting and sad that day that we finished our vacation. We are all looking forward to getting home, our own space, rooms, bed, and food but at the same time it also meant getting back to the real world, and responsibilities.
We tried to have one last fun activity in the last day followed up by another medium drive so we can get home.
- Pre Drive Friday Night to Altoona IA
- Day 1 Drive to Denver Co - Red Rocks Amphitheatre
- Day 2 Part 1 Drive to MOAB, Hike Corona Arch!!
- Day 2 Continued - Jet Boat Tour and Sunset at Dead Horse State Park
- Day 3 - Sunrise at Delicate Arch in Arches National Park, Part 1
- Day 4 - Star Gazing at Arches National Park then an afternoon at Capital Reef National Park
- Day 5 - Day 4 Sunset and Day 5 Sunrise at Bryce Canyon National Park
- Day 5 - Evening Drive to Zion National Park - The Road of Tunnels
- Day 6 - Zion N'tl Park The Narrows and Scouts Overlookd
- Day 7 - Emerald Pools, Pa'rus Trail, Cathedral Overlook, Drive to St George
- Day 8 - Mystic Hot Springs and Lots of Driving!!!
- Day 9 - Chimney Rock and Lots of Driving!
- Day 10 - Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo and Drive Home
Breakfast at the Hotel and Zoo as soon as the opened!
Just to make the kids Happy on the final night in a hotel we got to sleep in a little bit AKA past the sunrise and eat the hotel breakfast. My oldest was absolutely ecstatic since you could eat as much as he wanted, and they had real food. As long as real food is hotel eggs, sausage, and cinnamon rolls. Either way it was a nice change for them even though a couple of us were up at the crack of dawn and I was out scrounging for coffee.
Omaha's Henry Doorly Zoo
My wife has spent a fair amount of time researching which of the zoos in the country are the best. This means that whenever we travel we try to sprinkle these into our trips as a fun activity. I will say that the zoos we have gone to the past few years have been far above average and are much more interesting to go to than some of the smaller zoos.
Map of the Zoo
As you can see this is a fairly large zoo, the map almost reads like that of an amusement park. There's plenty of activities and the best part is most of the kids had already started school and we were lucky that our school didn't start till the next week. That meant we got the run of the place with much lower traffic than on a normal day.
Inside the Desert Dome
We started off exploring the desert dome. Which is in a very exceptionally impressive building made up of mostly skylights and it was very hot and dry climate inside. It was cool to see how large the habitats could be in such a large dome structure and the kids had a fun time picking up their favorites.
My Kids Favorite Animals
The following animals are the highlights of both my youngest and oldest kids in a particular order. Well that's not true these are in the order that we saw them and took the pictures on my phone.
**Buffalo Weaver
Be Buffalo Weaver was a favorite of my youngest, he sat there watching it thinking it was hilarious and was not wanting to move on. Well the rest of us sat there trying to explain to him that we had a lot more to see he said he could just sit there all day. Unfortunate for him his parents made him get up and continue the exploration
Klipspringer
This is my oldest favorite animal by far. He was trying to convince me that we should somehow find one and take it home and keep it as a pet. He thought it looked like an absolute in-house in his room pet that he should keep. I blame the fact that he spent some time this summer on the farm and got to play with some baby lambs.
Mahoney Kingdom of the night - Under the dome!
We quite honestly almost missed this entire display it was by chance as we were leaving to dome at one of my kids said that you could go downstairs and you wanted to because there was a picture of an animal on a wall. So we started to go downstairs unsure if it was for us or for workers only but there was an entire labyrinth downstairs of animals.
A little closer than I like honestly*
To be completely honest, I am intimidated by alligators and crocodiles. Being this close to this many makes me start to question everything including how stable the platform is I'm walking on, if it's really.secure.or.if.i will fall into the pit with them.
Albino Beast
I've never seen an albino alligator before. It was actually really cool to see and it looked so much different than the other ones.
My Family Likes Turtles
My family has always liked to look at turtles and tortoises. Maybe it's because of where we live and the abundance of turtles we have around us, and we see so many when we're out on the river. But either way I think they're really fun to watch swim and play in the water when you have a glass wall like this. It gives you a view that you're not used to
Tortoise are so cool - so massive!
I don't know anyone who doesn't like the tortoise. Considering how large they are, how gentle they are in your movements and how non-threatening they are as long as you don't mess with them they are like the perfect animal. My kids have always loved turtles and tortoises, especially the tortoises since they're not natural for us
Primates!!!
I think I must have put my phone away for the primate section park, I'm not sure why this is the only photo I have for any of the primates we saw.
Sea Lions - I want to swim like one!
Sea lions are really fun to watch swim underwater. They're one of my favorite animals live there is a nature documentary on because I always try to imagine what it must be like to swim that well under water. The way they move just looks like it would be fun and you could spend your day just exploring and playing underwater. I'll choose to ignore the fact killer whales and orcas like to eat you and just go with the front side.
My kids need a playgound like this
This looked absolutely amazing. An Island full of ropes and trees where the orangutans could play. What could be more fun than that. I know my boys if they had this would spend all day climbing and swinging from rope to rope and jumping in the water.
We fed the Giraffe
We let the kids feed a giraffe. We have done this one other time in Wisconsin dells and the drafts there literally licked your hand to get the character from you. This was slightly different as we were feeding them leaves of branches that you're supposed to hold but not give them the branches. The boys did okay but the giraffe was only a little interested. It's still fun to see them get up and close to animals that's how otherwise never see.
Acquarium
The zoo also had a really impressive aquarium but I did not take very many photos. Finally took a couple of the ones that I thought would turn out well given the dark lighting and how the glass makes it look blurry sometimes.
I love Jelly Fish!!.
There's something about jellyfish and zoos where they give them very dramatic lighting that makes me think I could just sit there and watch them for hours. The movements are synchronized in with Nick it always changing. I will say I spent a lot of time here by myself as my kids went off and explored. The reason why I don't have any pictures of anything else is that I spent most of my time watching these guys.
Forgot the name of this fish
The kids like this fish so I took a picture, I was also supposed to take a picture of the name plate but I apparently forgot and I have no idea what it is.
Drive Home 6 Hours - 405 Miles
After spending a solid half day plus at the zoo we just had a short drive home of 405 mi just over 6 hours. I believe that we got home right around 8:00 p.m. then started to unload, shower and stretch out legs.
Total Drive - 4000+ Miles
While adding up the root in each segment comes up well short of 4,000 miles, I had a triple diameter running the entire time. I crossed just over 4,000 miles by the time I rolled back into the house. That means I'm average we drove more than 400 miles a day since we only had 10 days. Well that might not be exactly true if we factor in the pre-drive night of 271 miles it's still pretty impressive.
It's the longest road trip we've taken to date and it's hard to imagine taking a longer one in such a compressed time schedule. It's honestly getting to the point of needing to take two full weeks if we're going to go any further. Not to mention any further is basically the equivalent to say you're going to drive two plus four days on each end of your vacation just to get your destination, and depending on your activity level it might start to make sense t fly.
I have the vacation stats down below so let's take a look.
Vacation Stats
Pre Drive Friday Night
Day -1 -Drive to Altoona
- 271 Miles
- 4 Hrs
Day 1 - Drive to Red Rocks & Hike - Drive to Look out Mountain and Eldorado Springs
- 694 Miles Red Rocks
- 10 Hours to Red Rocks
- 65 Miles Round Trip
- 2 Hours Round Trip
Day 2 Drive to MOAB - Hike, Jet Boat Tour and Dead Horse State Park
- 342 Miles
- 5.5 Hours
- Corona Arch, Pinto and Bow Tie Arch
- Jet Boat Tour
- Dead Horse State Park
Day 3 Arches National Park
- Sunrise at Delicate Arch
- Sand Dune and Broken Arch Trail, Balanced Rock, Windows Trials, Double Arch
- Mesa Arch
- Sunset at Whale Rock
- Driving 80 Miles, 1H 50M
Day 4 Sunrise at Arches, Drive to Capital Reef and Bryce Canyon
- Drive to Capital Reef 156 Miles 2hrs 45m
- Hickman Land Bridge
- Petroglyphs Panels
- Dixie National Forest
- Drive to Bryce Canyon 107 Miles - 2 Hrs
- Sunset at Bryce Canyon
Day 5 Sunrise at Bryce Canyon and Drive the Tunnels to Zion
- Sunrise at Bryce
- 7 Mile Hike on most of the trails.
- Drive 85 Miles (2 Hrs) to Zion
- Hike Emerald Pools
Day 6 Full Day In Zion National Park
- The Narrows Canyon
- Scouts Over Look via West Rim Trail
- Canyon Overlook Trail
Day 7 Hiking Zion and Driving to St George
- Emerald Pools
- Pa'rus Trail
- Cathedral Overlook
- Drive to St George 46 Miles
Day 8 Drive to Mystic Hot Springs for a soak before driving to Fort Morgan!
- Drive to Mystic Hot Springs 158 Miles - 2.3 Hours
- Relax for 2 hours at the Awesome Mystic Hot Springs
- Drive to Fort Morgan 9 Hrs - 556 Miles
Day 9 Drive to Chimney Rock and then Drive all DAY!!
- Driving 575+ Miles
- Chimney Rock
- More Driving
Day 10 Henry Doorly Zoo and Drive home
- Henry Doorly Zoo
- Drive 405 Miles 6+ Hrs Home
- Unpack - Shower - Get read for work the next day!!!!
Vacation Running Stats
Like I said I think we drove just over 4,000 miles and my accounting was well over 56 hours of drive time. Pretty impressive that I was able to drive all the miles on a vacation over 10 days. Thank God for coffee and my ability to get into the zone and just eat miles after miles of road up.
While I would like to say that the boys my wife were able to sleep in a car and recover from our excursions, the boys that said the back seat of the truck was too vertical for them to ever get much sleep so they spent the vast majority of their time playing Kindles in a Nintendo or two. We did make them put them down when we hit truly magical places with views they would never see again but other than that it was a lot of electronics.
- Total Time Driving - ~56 Hrs
Total Drive 4000+ Miles
Thanks for checking out my posts, it'll be a while before I post another travel post is I don't think I'm taking any trips anytime soon. Maybe we'll have the plan something closer and more local once the weather becomes more predictable.
Just ignore the miles at this point because I can't add any more stops to map it out accurately. The route is correct put the miles in time or not.