May 4, 2010 - Flagstaff Arizona to Zion National Park

May 4, 2010 (Yesterday) 
We had 250 miles to finish off our drive from Flagstaff, Arizona to Zion National Park in Springdale, UT.  According to Gladys (our GPS), it should take us 4.5 hours to complete the trip.  This is one of our first trips where we don't have major interstates to travel on. 

We spent a great morning exploring the old brick buildings of historic downtown Flagstaff.  Flagstaff is a beautiful town all nestled in evergreen forests, it reminded us of Evergreen where we were married.  We will definitely be returning to explore a bit more.  We even managed to find a guitar store for Matt and a scrapbooking store for me. 

Camping World was not able to fix the slide where it was leaking, but they gave us some directions on what we needed to have a dealer order for us for the fix.  It looks like we need new top and bottom seals on the bedroom slide.  We will call a dealer in Salt Lake City and take the trailer in on our way up North.  We picked up the trailer and were on the road at 1:15 in the afternoon. 

We had a beautiful drive through northeastern Arizona.  Most of the drive was through the Navajo nation and the Painted Dessert.  It was easy to see where it got its name.  As we neared the Arizona/Utah border, we went right by the very end of Lake Powell and the Glen Canyon Dam.  Definitely a return visit there as well as it was beautiful.

Glen Canyon Dam at the end of Lake Powell where the Colorado River enters Marble Canyon and continues down into the Grand Canyon.

 We entered Zion National Park at the east entrance and then continued through the park to our campground just on the outside of the South Entrance in Springdale, UT.  We had read about a very narrow tunnel that we would have to pass through by going this route as this is our planned route to go from Zion over to Bryce Canyons National Park.  We read all the restrictions - under 13.1 feet in height (Check! 12.6 for us - 6 inches to spare),  under 50 foot combined length (Check! 48.6 feet total trunk bumper to trailer ladder) - so we were ready for a hair raising ride through the tunnel.  Little did we know that the tunnel was the easiest part of the drive.  Lets just leave it at the fact that the drive took 6 hours with the last 13 miles on the park road taking an hour by itself.  When we did manage to take our eyes off the curvy narrow rough road (complete with 6 wonderfully narrow switchbacks), it was beautiful.  We will take the truck only back there in a couple of days to fully explore it.

Lookout Tunnel, here we come...

Needless to say, we arrive at the Zion Canyon Campground more than a bit tired.  We setup the RV with only one little minor leveling problem that required re-hitching the trailer and taking it off the leveling blocks that we didn't end up needing.  Opps, lesson learned to level before we unhitch the darn thing...

I will post tomorrow about our adventures today in the Park.