Grand Canyon Family Vacation

DAY 1

We meet in Phoenix at 1:30 PM, either at the airport or a downtown hotel if you arrive early. It will be hot in late June in Phoenix but we are headed north to higher elevation and lower temps. In two hours we'll be checking into our hotel in famous Sedona, land of the red rocks and (for those who believe) spiritual vortexes. We'll immediately cool off in the pool before departing for an early evening visit to Red Rocks State Park for a short hike and picnic dinner.

DAY 2

It will be a busy day, so we depart relatively early at 8:00 AM for the Grand Canyon. However, on the way we'll stop at Slide Rock State Park which runs along Oak Creek, the premier recreation area of Sedona. The featured activity of this park is the natural rock slide, 80 feet of slippery rock under Oak Creek. We then load up and finish the drive north to the Grand Canyon. Just looking over the rim will give you chills but we'll also rent bicycles to cycle on the closed-to-cars Hermit Road. The Grand Canyon is a destination everyone needs to see at least once.

DAY 3

After breakfast, we'll do the Trail of Time walk along the rim of the Grand Canyon. With rocks placed in time order along the trail, we'll learn about the geology of the canyon while viewing it from above. We'll say goodbye to the Grand Canyon and hello to another park, this one formed by a volcano, at Sunset Crater Volcano National Monument. Around the year 1085, the ground erupted in a shooting geyser of flaming rock. Much of the material cooled in the air and fell as cinders, forming a 1000-foot high volcanic cone. We'll also see "lava bombs" of rock that shot out of the ground and huge lava flows that swept over the ground. How would you have liked to have been one of those early peoples living in the area at the time? We'll learn about this amazing event and take a hike up an older, smaller volcano that will give us excellent views of the region. When we are done, we'll drive back south to the fun university city of Flagstaff, one of our favorite towns in the entire west, and check into our family-friendly hotel. In the evening we'll split up, with kids doing a fun Mexican restaurant while adults enjoy something a little nicer.

DAY 4

After breakfast, we'll shuttle a short 20 minutes to Walnut Canyon National Monument. The Grand is not the only canyon in northern Arizona. Gashing through the rolling high plateau, Walnut Canyon is 20 miles long and hosted permanent dwellings from about the year 600. Five hundred years after that, communities built cliff dwellings within the jagged walls of the canyon, which we can still see this day 900 years later. We'll explore the history of these early inhabitants of this land on a walk into this beautiful area and then have a picnic lunch in the park. In the afternoon, we'll shuttle to Meteor Crater, "the world's best preserved meteor impact site", which was formed about 50,000 years ago with a blast equivalent to 20,000 pounds of TNT. Later that afternoon we'll again have pool time (or an optional hike). Back in town, we'll have a final dinner together at Beaver Street Brewery, one of Flagstaff's fun eateries with a nice outdoor seating area, before meeting again to tour Lowell Observatory and using their five telescopes to learn about the stars and planets - a treat for those living in cities who rarely ever see the true night sky.

DAY 5

We are on our way back to Phoenix and the airport. But on the way we have one final stop, at Verde Valley Archeology Center. Here we learn how archeologists do the work that creates the results we have seen in our recent explorations. Afterwards you can grab an early lunch on your own and then we'll drop you off at the airport in Phoenix by 2:00 PM for your flight home.