Wow – and whew! That was an amazing trip! The first day arriving in Vegas, Brett and I walked the strip a bit and did some sightseeing but we we pretty wiped out from getting up ridiculously early for our flight so we called it an early night. Because then the next day – aka first day of “When We Were Young” I decided to hit as many bands as I could on the three stages that weren’t side by side which resulted in me catching at least part of 34 different bands and 32k steps / 14.15 miles and one massive blister on the ball of my left foot! My absolute favorites that day were “We The Kings” for which I wormed my way deep into the crowd getting as close as I felt safe to the front of it all. Brett took a pic of the crowd during that performance but said he couldn’t see me. Oyy!! I can’t believe he didn’t recognize me! haha I was right there 5 rows from the front in the top corner. Sheesh!

I also really enjoyed Sleeping With Sirens, Tonight Alive, Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, Silverstein, New Found Glory, Boys like Girls, Escape the Fate and Daisy Grenade (who I saw both days!)

Sunday felt like a good day to take it easy considering I was limping and knew we had a lot more activity coming our way during the rest of the week, so I managed to find a great spot that I could watch the Pink and Purple stage the whole day and mostly chill. (and even a chill day had me clocking over 16k steps!) Stellar day for sure – so many amazing performances but I truly LOVED that Kellin Quin came out and did ‘King for a Day’ with Pierce the Veil! Simple Plan was awesome as always, so was A Day To Remember, Neck Deep, and the The Used. I liked Cobra Starship too and Dashboard Confessional. Top performance of the evening was definitely Fall Out Boy! Man those guys really put on a great show!! And sadly – maybe because they were so amazing, I felt like the My Chemical Romance set was kind of flat. Black and white screen and basically just played “The Black Parade” with very little crowd interaction… or anything really. So I actually scooted out while they were still on and managed to get out of the arena ahead of the 85,000 or so people on the fairgrounds! Whew!

The next morning we took our rental car to Hoover Dam. Unfortunately the visitor center was closed for renovations and the next tour of the engine room etc was not due for over 90 mins, but we managed to have a decent look around and marveled at a whole lot of concrete!

Afterwards we started the 4 hour drive to Grand Canyon, checked into the Yavapai Lodge inside the park and headed over to walk along the rim and get some sunset pics. It truly is one of those places that pics cannot possibly do justice to (but I think the same about a couple of our other destinations on this trip!)

We got up super early the next morning and hit the South Kaibab Trail to try to get down to “Ooh aah point” for sunrise and then continued on down to “Cedar Ridge” which was a mile and a half down. Took a bit of a rest break and then started the climb back up. Whew! That was definitely not a cake walk! My comedian husband and I got within 10 feet of the top and while we paused for a minute to catch our breath he said, “That’s it – I’m done. Call the rescue guys.” We both busted out laughing, then took a sip of water and got the rest of the way up.

Once back to the top we took the shuttle over to “Yaki Point” and checked out another stunning view and finally saw a dreaded rock squirrel. LOL I had heard that they are the most dangerous things on the trail and that on any given day 30 people end up bitten and bloody from these bold little bastards but it still looked pretty cute to me. 🙂

All told we ended up with a whole lot of mileage from the Grand Canyon and my Fitbit gave me credit for 100 flights of stairs that day. Ha! So we decided to go have a nice lunch back at the lodge and then hit the road to Page, AZ for an overnight. We got some nice sunset pics of the Horseshoe Bend and called it a night! The next morning we did a tour with a Navajo tour company that took us to Secret Antelope Canyon and back to Horseshoe Bend for a far more private viewing, this time from Navajo land. It was a really wonderful tour. I absolutely ADORED the slot canyon.

After our “relaxing” day in Page we drove the 3 hours or so to Zion (there were a bunch of back and forth time changes on this trip – lol) and just took it easy for the evening with a nice Thai food dinner in town and a relatively early night – so that we could get up while it was still dark again and get our butts over to Zion. We did the Emerald Pools hikes – lower, middle and upper) and then the River walk to where the “narrows” begins. I was not really looking to do the waist deep hike in Oct – heck I decided to not even get my shoes wet if I could help it but Zion is also truly beautiful!

We hiked for around 5 or 6 hours I guess and then headed back to Vegas to check in at the Excalibur and catch the Bellagio dancing water show. We had a fairly early flight home the next morning and I spent the next 2 days sifting through around 1,200 emails and begging forgiveness from the cats! 😉 I have already gone on too long about this trip, but OMG it was just so beautiful! We definitely want to see more parks and now that we have a “lifetime senior pass” to the National Parks (which Brett and I are lovingly calling our “Geezer Pass” we will absolutely be planning to check off a few more!