Zion park was absolutely beautiful! We were taken away with the views. While it was a hot day at 104 degrees, we still hiked a trail. As we pulled up to the park we saw signs saying to park outside the park because it was full inside. We ignored those signs and waited in the line of cars to get in. We found a spot right away in the visitor center parking lot. The visitor center was crawling with people and it took us a few minutes to figure out what was going on....

We drove out to Death Valley after spending the morning at Hoover Dam. We thought the it was hot at Hoover Dam at 102, but Death Valley was 123 degrees! The visitor center was about 15 miles inside the park and closed at 5:00. We went straight there and caught the last movie at 4:00. The scenery was brown and desert-like. It is the largest park in the continental US. It also calls itself the hottest spot in the world with a recorded temp of 134 degrees. The ho...

We headed out to Hoover Dam around 9:00 am. It was already 97 degrees with the forecast to be 104 for the day. The drive over was easy and scenic. We parked in the parking garage and entered the visitors center to start our tour. When we were here in the 1990's we took the dam hard hat tour where you went down into the dam. Now the only option was a power station tour. No one goes down into the dam. We opted to take the power station tour. Our tour guide was Ino ...

We slept in this morning. The heat yesterday took a lot out of us. We ate breakfast around 9:00 am. We were going to try to rent bicycles, but found that we would have to go all the way to the visitors center at the front of the park. So instead we boarded a bus and west to headed to Hermits Rest. There are 9 bus stops on the Hermits Rest Trail. You could walk the entire length or take a bus out to the end. We ended up taking a bus the entire way. The round trip ...

The day began with a full breakfast at the Maswik Food Court. We had a smooth water rafting excursion booked with Colorado River Discovery. The rafting location was 2 1/2 hours away so we had a bit of a grove ahead of us. Desert View Drive To get to the area of the river for the tour we could either board a bus at our lodge for an extra $100 per person or we could drive ourselves there. We decided to save $500 and drive ourselves. The rafting entrance point was a...