It is obvious that I know a little bit about travel, otherwise why would I write this book, right? Well one thing I do know is how humbling Mother Nature (MN) can truly be. No matter how much you plan for every contingency or how you work out your game plan, good old MN really doesn’t care. Connie and I had it all worked out on how to beat the crowds in Utah and when the weather would be the most tolerable, or so we thought. There is a lot to say for working at a smaller facility, but one of them is not staffing and scheduling flexibility. It took almost two months to get my vacation approved and some major teeth pulling as well. So the thought of changing my vacation time was ludicrous at best, so even though we knew the weather might be an issue, we just never thought it would have such an impact on out trip. Right off the bat the weather knocked out the two biggest reasons for our trip, the absolute must do’s for us. But I digress, lets talk about our plan and how many times I had to change it before we even hit the road.

We knew our budget was going to be a little tight, so we thought about taking our conversion van, so we could cut out most of our need for hotels/motels. That sounded good until we found out about the roads to two of our must do goals. They necessitated a 4X4 vehicle. We checked into renting one, and for the three days we would need one, and I realized that I would have to remortgage my house to afford it. We were talking just south of a $1000 for the three days. I thought what about pulling our Jeep Liberty? I found out that my hitch was not strong enough, so I decided to have it upgraded. It was still cheaper than staying at hotels for the whole trip. Once I did that I reserved the car carrier at U-Haul, I saw the price of $60.00, so silly me I thought that was the price. It was after all just a trailer, how much could it be, right, well wrong?! The wanted over $700 for the 12 days I wanted to rent it. I looked up other options and Penske only rented them for a day.

So now I had to figure out what to do. My wife thought about us driving both vehicles. That was not a bad idea at first until you figured that our mileage would go from 1,200 miles to 2,400 and being that the gas was about $4.00 a gallon, my wallet started screaming, not to mention that we would not have be able to share the driving or have the time together on the trip. So we opted to take the Jeep Liberty. The only problem was that I had already packed for the van travel. Now we had to cut back on what we could bring, which included camping gear and camera gear. It also meant that we would have to spend more time in hotels. We had planned on a trial overnight backpack trip to Arizona Hotsprings to see how well we could tolerate it. I had of course everything already packed for that. With all the changes we just had to make and the weather again was just not cooperating, we had to cancel that. More re-packing had to be done, with all these changes, you just knew that some things would be missed.

However the biggest problem was one of storage. I thought about buying a large box for the roof rack, But we had just spent $400 for a hitch that we did not need for this trip. Eventually it will come in handy, just not right now. So we had to go with what we had. I opted for 3 travel boxes for the roof. I also had a rack and box for the hitch on our Jeep Liberty. We decided to bring an extra gas can and a large water carrier. So our vehicle looked like the Beverly Hillbilly truck, with the only thing missing was Granny on her rocking chair. I included a photo of our setup above.

Part of the trip required two overnight backpacking excursions. With a small tent and food, cooking gear, a scaled down camera kit. The problem is that I wanted to do some astro-photography with a sky tracker. The kit for this weighed in at 13kg, not including the camera. With water I was looking at about 35kg. We also needed a larger tent for our car camping portion of the trip. Well you can guess what I forgot, the large tent, for one. My wife forgot the new hiking poles that I had just bought her, not to mention we both forgot several other incidentals that would have been nice to have. This is was all due to the major and frequent changes we had to make to our trip plan. This vacation was fast becoming a real mess.

We also were trying to get the Liberty to pass the smog check. After dumping over $500 more we got it to pass, but we only had a paper for the vehicle registration which we had to tape to the window. The box I put on the hitch blocked the license plate, so I had to mount the plate on the box, since it was not lit up we were limited to daylight driving. Knowing my luck we would get a citation for not having the license plate illuminated. When we travel to Utah we always fill up our gas tank at the Indian Reservation on Highway 15. Well that was the next surprise. I could not pump gas into the tank. There was apparently some issue with the tank. So we had to by a metal gooseneck funnel to fill the gas tank up on the trip. We did this for the whole 10 days. Filling the gas tank was now a family affair.

When we finally made it to Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, we had our next misfortune, due to all the snow and rain they had experienced in the last two weeks our 50 mile dirt road to both Reflection Canyon and Coyote Gulch was impassable. So now I had to reconfigure all of our gear, and the gas I had purchased for the gas can was no longer necessary. If I would have know I could have brought my bigger box for the hitch, We were also stuck with backpacking pillows, which suck, and a backpacking tent which sucks even more. Besides all this the two major must do things were knocked off of our list. These were the main reason for the trip, and the reason we made all of these plans. So now we had to revise our whole travel itinerary. Thank goodness we had a list of second and third tier goals for our trip. Since we were in such isolated locations,m there was no cell phone service, so thanks to my analog backup, ie, maps and books we were able to muddle through and come up with a new plan. There were a few roads that were dicey but we were so fed up with the weather issues that we just went ahead and did it anyway. I will discuss this more completely in Chapter 28.

I have been on a lot of trips in my day, this was one most annoying trips for me. The only trip that required more changes was the 18 day road trip to Florida and back, which required a major overall where only about 20% of our original sightseeing goals were met. Thanks to a lot of backup planning and flexibility we managed to salvage that trip as well.

I am not saying that you will have issues on your trips or travels, all I am saying is that is always a good idea to have backups for trips. I have had hotels overbook me, so have airlines. While you can’t plane for every contingency, having a little extra money or an extra emergency card or fud can go a long way to saving a vacation.