My parents are notorious for taking long whirlwind trips in a short amount of time. They often drive the 800 miles to East Tennessee to see my father’s folks over the course of a weekend. They regularly drive a thousand miles or more to Colorado, or Arizona, or Utah, stop to see a few sights for a day or two, and then drive back. Once they drove all the way from Oklahoma to Washington State and made it back within the week.

Me, I like to plan things out. I want to spend time thinking about where I’m going, and what I want to see, and book tours or at least my hotel rooms.

So, when my father called me two weekends ago asking if I wanted to take a trip with him and my brother out west in a couple of weeks, my initial thought was, “No.” But the old man is getting old. I don’t know how many more trips he has left in him. This kind of felt like a last hurrah. A conversation with my brother only strengthened that notion.

A couple of weeks turned into, “How about we leave on Wednesday,” and my desire to go lessened even more. But go we went. Without any notion of where we were going, without any plan on where to stay or even how long we were gonna be gone, we loaded up the car and headed out before sunrise that Wednesday morning.

We hauled it long and hard all day, stopping for the night somewhere past Gallup, New Mexico. We initially planned on staying in Gallup, but after my brother turned up the fact that Gallup has one of the highest crime rates per capita in the country, we drove a little further.

Trying to save a little money we just booked one room at a cheap motel. It was a little awkward sharing a bed with my 50-year-old brother, but a little dose of melatonin and the exhaustion of a long day kept me from caring too much.

When we awoke my brother noticed that there was a canyon nearby. The Canyon de Chelly National Monument sounded interesting, we all agreed and so we checked it out. I’m glad we did for it was spectacular.

A few more hours on the road led us to Monument Valley. Me and Dad had been there before, but it was new country to my brother. Me and Dad had visited it years before.

Growing up we didn’t do much travelling. We’d make the trek to East Tennessee to see my father’s family once a summer, and maybe around Christmas but that was pretty much it. I remember once, when my father was asleep in the back of the car, my mother pulled off at some little amusement park and had bought tickets before my dad knew what was happening. That was us vacationing.

We did go to Orlando when I was in high school because my brother had graduated Naval Boot Camp there, and later we visited him in Charleston, South Carolina, but my father didn’t make any of those trips.

A few years after I graduated college me and mom convinced dad to take a trip out west. I can’t remember many of the details now, but we visited Monument Valley, the Painted Desert, and the Grand Canyon, plus a few other sites in that area.

Dad loved it. And it set him on a path of regular travel ever since. So, this trip felt a little like a reunion tour of the trip that got him started.

If you’ve ever seen an old Western Movie, you’ve probably seen Monument Valley. John Ford shot half a dozen films there or so, and the list of movies and television shows that have had at least one scene set there is enormous. It is a beautiful, strange, amazing bit of land filled with giant rock formations that look completely out of this world. It was a big foggy when we were there which allowed for some interesting photographs.

Dad had the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in his sights so we headed that way next. We drove to Page, Arizona that night, with plans to drive to the Staircase early the next morning.

We got to Page relatively early and discovered there was a beautiful horseshoe bend in the river nearby. A quick hike to that brought some more amazing views.

The next morning, on the road we discovered a cool little pull-off with some excellent-looking formations. Our phones told us to drive to Kenab, Utah to get inside Grand Staircase, but once we were there we realized that we had essentially driven right past it. The park is quite huge and the things we were interested in seeing were North East of where we were, making it another several-hour drive to get to where we thought we were.

By this point we were all already pretty well exhausted from all the driving, and Dad was already hinting that he was ready to go home. A quick look at the map we found at the tour guide stop showed a cool-looking slot canyon to the north about 90 miles. We decided we’d make that our last stop before heading home.

The tourist map wasn’t a very good one and we soon found ourselves accidentally in Bryce Canyon. From what I can figure the slot canyon was actually at the bottom of it. Not wanting to make that hike we decided to just look at it all from above. It had snowed that morning granting us some very beautiful views.

After that, we headed home. That’s a 1,200-mile drive home for those keeping track and it took us the rest of that day and all of the next. All in all it was a long, hard little vacation, but a good one. I still prefer to plan things out better and stay longer, but I’m glad I went.

If you’ve read this far and would like to see the rest of the photos I took I created an Amazon Photo Album.