America The Beautiful

 Our plan upon arriving in Arizona was to drive north, stopping along the way at some smaller National Parks to break up the drive and make use of our arrival day.  We planned to purchase our America the Beautiful pass from the first park we stopped at and use it the remainder of our trip.  Note to my Deaf readers - you likely qualify for a free Access Pass with doctors note.  Score for saving $80 a year! 

While waiting on our luggage, Wifey decided to call our first destination and double check they sold the pass.  She's still not sure why, as she didn't REALLY have any doubts it would be, but still, what's a phone call?  And are we glad she did ... turns out they do NOT currently sell the pass (COVID) and we needed to regroup.  

About this time, on Hubby's lead we had reached our rental car and were ready to hit the road.  Feeling stressed, Wifey suggested we go back into the rental car building, pull out a laptop, access wifi and figure out our next steps.  Sometimes working on mobile just doesn't do it.  Hubby graciously agreed and we hit pause.  

Wifey continued to work to find an alternate location for purchase that wasn't significantly out of our way north to great frustration.  We called the State office of National Parks who said the only place we could buy them was only open MWF until 3:00 pm (there was no way we could drive there by then).  But we then called that particular park office and asked if there was anyway we could pre-order and pick up after 3.  The park clarified they are open daily until 5:00 and would be happy to sell us a pass in that time.  So, we scrapped our "tour as we drive" plan and hit the road for Sedona.

A few hours later we purchased our pass and then continued north to Flagstaff.  The northern route through Sedona was a longer drive than anticipated so we just focused on making it to our night's lodging.  

In Flagstaff we stocked up on groceries, bottled water, and a cooler which would be our fridge for the next week before turning West for the final 2 hours of our drive.  Of course, that required stopping at Sams Club, Walmart, and a Gas Station!  

   

At last, we arrived at our hotel, booked on Hotels.com!  We were pleased and SO CLOSE to the GC! 

The hotel was average but expensive (ish).  It did have an open ice machine, which is pretty great in the days of COVID.  In the end, we paid about $140 a night for it. While we did partially offset this with a gift card, you're definitely paying for location.  We considered staying further south in Williams, but got a deal on this one.  The regular price is even higher.  There IS something cool about being so close to a national park that you can wake up early and just make a last minute decision to go see sunrise in the park.  Or see wild life roaming about your hotel grounds ... but those are later posts.