Trip Out West: Day 1

This trip was fantastic. We got to see so many things, but we didn't feel like we are overbooked or were exhausted. It really was planned well thanks to Ryan. We visited AZ, UT, CO and NM.

Day One: 9/16/17

We had to get to the airport crazy early for our flight. I wanted to sleep most of the flight, so I stayed up most of the night watching The Simpsons. We had a 6am direct flight which made me very happy. I HATE layovers. It was so nice to put on my headphones and sleep. We landed in Phoenix at 7:30am local time and headed to get some road trip snacks. Once we got our food, we stopped at Cracker Barrel and saw our first cactus. This was the first of about a million cactus we saw through out the trip, but it was cool to see different scenery.

Our next stop was Tombstone, Arizona. It is very touristy and cheesey, but it was still really cool to see. A lot of Old West characters walking around and some shops selling cowboy hats and such. We were able to see the reenactment of the gun fight at the O.K. Corral. I was extremely distracted through out the whole thing because there was a giant convention of yellow jackets flying around. I have never seen so many yellow jackets in area. I was positive someone was going to get stung.

After the gun fight, we headed to Tucson so we could visit Saguaro National Park which is a cactus haven. Besides the pretty views, the highlight of this visit was Jess introducing me to the National Park Passport book. The National Park Passport book is really cool. You can collect stamps from all the National Park units all over the country. The book is divided into geographic regions. My only complaint about the book is that there aren't nearly enough pages for the all stamps you can collect all over the country. Once I got my book, if there was somewhere that didn't have a stamp, I wasn't interested. I became stamp obsessed. 

Saguaro National Park is really beautiful. We drove around  and took a ton of pictures. This is when I tried to figure out how to use a selfie stick. I'm aware that a selfie stick is very tourist-y, but I wanted to get pictures of all four of us without have to ask random strangers to take pictures of us. Once I figured out how to use it, I was hooked and packed it everywhere we went. 

After we left, we ate dinner, headed to the hotel and immediately went to bed. It was a long day and we were getting up early to head out for our next adventure. 

Ryan and Jess's blog:  http://ryanandjessandstuff.blogspot.com

National Park Service: https://www.nps.gov

Passport to your National Parks: https://www.eparks.com