A Summary of My 2016 Travel Adventures

At the beginning of every new year I like to look back at the previous year and review my favorite outfits, and remember all the home, garden, and crafting projects I took on, and also all our travel adventures.  Our travel adventures is always my favorite to review because I remember such happy times.  I also think one tends to forget vacations so quickly, so it's nice to go back and look at pictures and re-live them through memories.

Here is where I traveled this year!

This year was the first time in probably over thirty years where I traveled by plane alone.  I must admit, I had a lot of anxiety about it.  So did my husband.  He said over and over again "Just come back to me!"  He was so afraid I would die in a plane crash.  I don't know why.  But, I made it to Florida safely and back, and it was a really good experience for me to do that all by myself.  I went to Florida for two weeks to see my son and daughter.  We had so much fun and crammed so much into that two week period is was ridiculous!  Here are some of the highlights of that trip:

                                       Florida Adventures

Cape Canaveral National Seashore

Cape Canaveral was one of my favorite Florida beaches.  I love the natural setting and the absence of the typical tourist stuff you see on most beaches.

The Wizarding World Of Harry Potter

Seeing the Wizarding World of Harry Potter was one of the highlights of this vacation.  I've never been much of a Harry Potter fan until I went here...now I'm a Harry Potter fan fanatic!

Disney Springs

Disney Springs is such a beautiful place to spend an evening.  

The 16th Annual Orlando Wetlands Festival

Hands down our favorite activity of this trip was the Orlando Wetlands Festival.  It was one of the happiest days of my life.  My son loved it so much he wants to " ...go back and take Dad!"  I don't know if that will ever be possible as it is only one day during the year, but who knows?  Maybe when he retires someday?

Cocoa Beach

Even though Cocoa Beach is probably my least favorite beach in Florida, it was still fun to see all the "I Dream of Jeannie" memorabilia and the cruise ships.

Mead Botanical Gardens

Mead Gardens was a bit rustic, but we sure enjoyed the pre-historic size palms!  Plus, I captured this great photo of my son.

The Albin Polasek Museume and Sculpture Gardens

This was such a beautiful and tranquil garden!

Harry P. Leu Gardens

We loved the giant bamboo in the Harry P. Leu Gardens.

Kraft Azalea Park

The magic of Kraft Azalea Park was beautiful

My children have since moved back to Illinois and even though everyone says it's nice to have them closer to home again, I am going to miss going to Florida.  I absolutely love that beautiful state!

In 2016 I only took two "big" vacations...my solo trip to Florida and our road trip out west, but we had a lot of fun weekend adventures.

In February we went to Minneapolis to see the Broadway Tour of "Newsies".  We rented a hotel room and had a wonderful romantic night.  You can read about that adventure HERE.


Easter arrived early this year, and we did our usual trek to Milwaukee to see our home church's Easter Musical.  We also visited with our lifelong friends Kirk and Shannon and enjoyed a movie in a historic theatre!  You can read all about that fun weekend HERE.

We also went to Stillwater, Minnesota in the spring to hunt for treasures for my new beauty room!

The month of May brought our biggest road trip ever:  3500 miles to Las Vegas, Nevada!  We spent three days in Vegas, but had a lot of fun on the way there and back too!

Our first stop was in Glenwood Springs, Colorado where we enjoyed hot springs for the first time in our lives.  You can read about that experience HERE.

After checking into our hotel in Fruita, Colorado for the night, we took a stroll on top of Dinosaur Hill.


But perhaps our favorite part of this trip was just the jaw-dropping scenery to get there!  Read all about our adventures of driving Scenic 1-70 West HERE.

In Vegas we enjoyed our stay at the Flamingo Hotel, shopped till we dropped, saw Celine Dion in concert, admired all the flowers and gardens,  and walked around the strip admiring all the lights.

We took a fun bus trip from Vegas to see the Hoover Dam and Grand Canyon West.



On the way home from Las Vegas we stopped at Arches National Park where we hiked one of the most difficult trails of our lives, yet found this park one of the most beautiful places on earth!

And our final day of this amazing road trip was spent in Vail, Colorado;  one of the prettiest mountain towns I ever did see!  I felt I was in Europe, not America!





In July we went tent camping with the kids for five whole days!  We saw lots of waterfalls at Copper Falls State Park, Amnicon Falls State Park and Pattison State Park, The Black River National Scenic Byway,  and we visited the cities of Ashland,  Bayfield, and Hayward.



I also attending my very first Blogger Meet-Up with Karen from "She Thought She Could So She Did" in Minnehaha Park, Minnesota




In late summer my husband and I had a blast at the Minnesota State Fair and Wildwoods Wildlife Zoo!



This year we had an unusually long and warm fall, so we took advantage of it and went hiking somewhere every weekend.

We went to Hoffman Hills State Recreation Area

Wildcat Mountain

We combined a convention in St. Paul, Minnesota with a visit to Vermilion Falls Park on the way home.

On our second attempt, we successfully hiked Barn Bluff in Red Wing, Minnesota

And we visited the sweet historic town of Galena, Illinois (post coming next week!)

We don't travel as much during the winter because of winter road conditions and we also can't leave our house longer than one day or it freezes up (we heat with wood).  But we were able to visit the kids for a couple of days during Thanksgiving Week (Jackson's First Car Trip) and we made our annual trip to the Mall of America where I got lots of new goodies including my first pair of OTK boots!

As always, as I complete this post I feel extremely grateful.  Many of you know we had planned to take more vacations this year but had to cancel them due to an unplanned medical bill (thanks ObamaCare!  Looking forward to the GOP "Repealing and Replacing" it).  So instead of taking long vacations in far away places we did a lot more locally and a lot of weekend trips.  It's been not only fun, but I've discovered things in my own neck of the woods I didn't even know existed.

I'm really looking forward to 2017 and a lot more opportunities to travel.  We already planned our spring vacation and we got a ocean front room on Myrtle Beach for five days and we will also be swinging through Charleston on the way home.  We still hope to take that vacation out west to see Mt. Rushmore and maybe we will make it back to Branson and elsewhere too.... we'll see!  Here's to good health and no more medical bills!

Have a Great Day!  Amy

Linking Up with these Fabulous Blogs HERE!

A Bus Tour to Hoover Dam and the Grand Canyon West Rim

This is a continuation of a travel series of a road trip I took to Las Vegas in May with my husband.  To start at the beginning, read THIS POST.   The rest of the posts are HERE, HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE in chronological order.


Even though we were in Las Vegas for three nights and two days, we only spent one full day exploring Vegas for the other day was spent seeing the Hoover Dam and getting a glimpse of the Grand Canyon.

There are many bus companies that you can choose from that will pick you up right at your hotel and take you to the Grand Canyon.  They all vary in price, luxury, and what they have to offer.  You can choose from a personal guided tour that will cost you around a thousand dollars per person or you can go economy style like we did and pay about $100 per person for just a bus trip to the Canyon, breakfast, lunch, and admission/bus fees in the Grand Canyon West Rim.

The bus company we chose was Grand Canyon Tours Company.   Now I'll be honest and say I bought tickets to this tour without doing my research first.  I thought there was only one bus company and their website was the first website that came up when I googled it.  After I purchased the tickets, I read one horrible review after another of this company on Trip Advisor, and I was tempted to cancel my tickets.  But I would have lost around $70.00 if I did that, so I chose to keep my reservation and make the best of it.

Now your probably wondering if we had a car, why we didn't just drive to the Grand Canyon ourselves.  My husband was just ready to sit back and let someone else do the driving for a change, and I don't blame him.

The tour included a brief stop at the Hoover Dam, a bag breakfast and lunch, water bottles,  and admission to the West Rim.

We only had about twenty minutes at the Hoover Dam, which is really all you need.  It's quite a hike up to the look out point of the dam, and that takes most of your time.  I would have liked a few more minutes to read all the display signs at the base of the walk way to the dam.

It is quite an impressive view.  The water is so blue and the mountain back drop is breath-taking.

The main reason it seems most people on Trip Advisor didn't like this company is because you spend so much time waiting in line and riding the bus and less than four hours at the Grand Canyon itself.  It seemed to take forever to get there.  Our bus picked us up at 6:30 a.m., and then we drove around for awhile to pick other people up.  Then we were taken to a bus station where we had to get off the bus and get in a long line where we would receive a bag breakfast and hot coffee and a name tag/number of our tour.  The reason they do this is because everyone takes different types of tours so they have to separate people into the tour group that they paid for.  Once you understand this, it makes sense.  But I don't think most people on Trip Advisor understood why they had to go to the bus station.

Once at the Grand Canyon, you have to wait while your bus driver parks the bus and gets your  tickets.  There are no cars allowed inside the Grand Canyon West Rim.  Everyone has to park in a designated parking lot and from there you take other buses to the viewing areas.  Once we were handed our tickets we had to wait in a very, very, very long line to get on a park bus.  I was trying not to get upset because the day was half over and I was very anxious to see the canyon.

We took the West Rim Bus Tour because it was the closest to Las Vegas and therefore the shortest bus ride (and the most inexpensive).  On this tour are three stops along the West Rim:  Hualapai Ranch, Eagle Point, and Guano Point.  We skipped the ranch because we live in farm country and we do not need to see horses and other animals.  We were worried about time and wanted as much time as possible for canyon viewing.  But if you have small children, the ranch might be of interest to you.

So after waking up at 5:30 in the morning and standing in two long lines and a long bus ride, I finally got to see the canyon...this is my reaction:

My first reaction?  This was it?  My husband and I weren't impressed.  We had seen so many spectacular views on our drive out to Vegas, that this just didn't seem that amazing to us.  Of course, that thinking changed when we went to the next stop.  This was Eagle Point where the main attraction was the formation that looked like a Eagle and the Skywalk.  We did not go on the Skywalk because I have a fear of heights and I did not think I could handle it.  Plus it would have cost us another $30.00 per ticket.

My next reaction was "There's way too many people here, I can't get a clear view!".  We were at the Grand Canyon during the off-season, and yet there were still so many people.  There are no barriers between the edge and the canyon, and I was worried with all the people someone might accidentally get pushed over (in fact, since I have been home I read a story where a 35 year old woman did fall to her death when she stepped out of the way to allow another gentleman to step by (read the full story HERE).

I stayed far away from the edge at all times, but my daredevil husband risked his life to get some amazing pictures...like this one of the Skywalk.

Or this one looking straight down into the canyon.

Guano Point was a much more impressive view for us than Eagle Point.  Even though it was still crowded, there is more space for people to disperse plus we left a lot of people behind back at Eagle Point.

At Guano Point is a circular rock formation that you can climb (yes, I climbed it!), and you get a majestic 360 degree panoramic views of the West Rim of the Grand Canyon from the top.  It's amazing!

We were at the Grand Canyon in the middle of the day, probably the worst time of the day for photography.  The sun was so strong and bright.  But when you take a bus tour, you are on their time table.  If I were to go again, I would try to be there in the morning or twilight.  However, I still  enjoyed the colors in the layers of rock and the shadows cast onto the formations from another formation.

Did you know Guano Point literally means "Bat Droppings"?  That's because there is an old mine here where all kinds of bats, and their droppings, were found.  See the shadow behind me?  That's the shadow of the cable car station that is still here.

There were so many of these big black birds flying around Guano Point.  There is a restaurant on this point, so these birds are very people friendly for their always hoping to get scraps of food.

My opinion of the Grand Canyon changed once I reached Guano Point and I was able to walk around a bit and get some unobstructed views.  It's so hard to tell scale in pictures, but the sheer size of this place is phenomenal.  Look closely at the first narrow rock formation on the right.  Those are people walking on the ridge.  They are so small, you can barely see them, but it helps to give you perspective of the magnitude of this national treasure.

Now here is an interesting fact that I did not know prior to my visit.  Grand Canyon West Rim is not part of the Grand Canyon National Park.  It is owned and operated by the Hualapai Indian Reservation.  Grand Canyon National Park is only the South and North Rims which are more developed have lots of lodging options in and around the park.

The majority of the West Rim visitors arrive from Las Vegas because it's only 118 miles away vs. 350 miles to the South Rim.

Most tourist's to the West Rim only spend 3 to 4 hours there.

I wish I had known these things before my trip.  My husband and I did not have the Grand Canyon experience we were hoping for.  We wanted time to be able to hike and explore, but the West Rim really does not have any hiking trails other than the short one on Guano Point.  You need to go to Grand Canyon National Park for that.  However, I do not regret going and getting a taste of the Grand Canyon...and that's all this was...a taste.  I think if you want to experience the beauty of the canyon, you need to stay in a lodge or campground in the national park.

I don't regret taking a bus tour, in fact, I'd recommend it to anyone coming from Vegas.  The tours save you a lot of money on all the extra fees that can add up if you try and do it alone.  Plus, the area is in a remote wilderness location.  The gas stations/convenience stores are very few, and the two that I experienced provided minimal services at best.   There is also a 14 mile unpaved road leading to the Hualapai Indian Reservation that can be quite bumpy and hard on a vehicle.

Although I had hoped to cross the Grand Canyon off my bucket list, I don't think I can now that I have done the research and know more.  Everyone says the most beautiful and spectacular views of the canyon are on the south rim, and many people don't even consider the west rim part of the canyon.  That I think is a bit nonsense, but it does entice me to dream of seeing more.

Have a Great Day!  Amy

Linking Up with these Fabulous Blogs HERE!
SaveSave