The Family Roadtrip, revisited

The road

My father was an academic, which, in his day, meant you were long on time but short on money (these days it means you are short on both), so family vacations, in those decades of cheap gasoline, were often road trips. Long road trips, with the longest of them all a tour in which some sizable fraction of our large family drove five thousand miles from Massachusetts to New Mexico and back. My memories of that Southwestern odyssey are faint and horrible; most pointedly I recall waking up in the back of a crowded station wagon on Christmas morning with gum in my hair and a view much like the one above--to a child, as bleak, snowless, and in general unChristmassy a vista as could be imagined. My father's memories, as revealed in recent email correspondence, are even fainter, though possibly more cheery. In the interest, then, of doing a better job preserving the historical record in this generation, and in case anyone might want to follow in our footsteps, here's a virtual triptik of our more recent tour of the area.

While gas is no longer cheap, flights to Las Vegas are. Our hotel offered this bizarre (in light of the Vegas water situation) view, a heated outdoor pool, and the novel (to the kids) experience of traversing a smoky gaming floor with your luggage.

Felix had contracted a non-COVID bug just before leaving, so after a morning drive through Red Rock Canyon he returned to the hotel while the rest of us headed for the Strip. Gid got his first glimpse of the Sphere, the holy place where his favorites, U2, are resident. He was also gratified to encounter an Elvis impersonator who, projecting the King to the present day, was drunk, grotesquely fat, and confined to a mobility scooter. Vegas always satisfies.

We also found spheres indoors, oversized and extra glitzy as per Vegas requirements. Gideon and I continued gawking while Talia, in a move she later regretted, detoured to the Big Apple rollercoaster.

By New Year's Eve Talia and Felix were both recovered so we set out for dinner and a nighttime view of the Sphere, which looms large everywhere you go.

It was New Year's Eve, and the Sphere provided the perfect backdrop to wait out midnight (though in truth we only made it to NYC time).

We left Sin City on New Year's Day to tour some even more impressive tech, the Hoover Dam.

We found the dam tour well worth the time: it is an incredible structure and we were delighted to rediscover the acoustics of dam-length tiled tunnels.

For some strange reason my previous visits to the Southwest had included totally skippable landmarks, such as Four Corners, but had missed the greatest landmark of them all: the Grand Canyon. We spent the next day hiking and driving along it.

There is no way to capture the majesty of this place in pictures or words (though this might help?). We came, we gawked, one of us threw a rock into it, and we left with a new sense of time and geography.

Seeing the rock formations of Monument Valley was the initial impetus for the trip: Gideon had noticed a shot on a screensaver and decided we should see it in person. How right he was. We arrived at dusk so had to save touring those distant beauties for the next day.

Our hotel--Goulding's Lodge--was nestled up against one of these red-orange buttes, however, and the same outfit ran a campground a little further on where we went to take sunset photos.

No photo editing here: sunset colors on these rocks are truly otherworldly.

And at dusk the rocks are transformed again into a lovely pink.

The next day we entered the Navajo park that contains the Mittens and other grand and bizarre formations for a cold but awesome hike.

One of the few pleasant memories from that long-ago Southwest trip was seeing (and smelling, oh the mesquite!) cave dwellings, and Talia and I were blown away by the ones we visited on Mesa Verde on our last tour through New Mexico, so we jumped at the chance to show the kids this isolated and magnificent example in the Navajo National Monument.

As a bonus we got to talk to some adorable rangers.

We took a break from all the red to see some pink (and blue snow!) at Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park. Worth the detour if you're ever in the neighborhood.

The next stop was Page, Arizona, where we took a guided walk through the over-photographed Antelope Canyon, visited the Glen Canyon Dam (no tour, unfortunately), and saw (or missed, for some of us) Horseshoe Bend. Striking red rock throughout.

Our penultimate day was spent at Zion, where, more than at any other point in the trip, I appreciated visiting in the less crowded winter season.

Having seen the best nature the Southwest has to offer we returned to the urban charms of Vegas where Gideon discovered robot-stirred boba tea.

We ended the trip with a visit to one of my favorite places, the Pinball Hall of Fame...

Where we played this unique head-to-head machine. Other than this epic battle the boys did not fight much, and at no point did anyone get gum in their hair. Roadtrip success!