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Will this work or is it to much?
We are flying into Vegas mid morning and will drive straight to the grand canyon spend the night and start the next morning:
Day 1: Grand Canyon Drive during Day- Drive to Bryce Canyon or Halfway Day 2: Bryce Canyon Day 3 Bryce Canyon half day drive to Moab Day 4- Moab Day 5- Moab Day 6- Moab Day 7 Drive from Moab to Grand Tetons Day 8 Grand Teton Day 9-11 Yellow Stone Day 12 Drive Yellow Stone to Yosemite Stopping after ten hours in Winnemucca NV Day 13 Finish Drive Day 14-15 Yosemite Day 16 Sequoia Day 17 Back to Vegas Thoughts on this? To busy? What would you cut out? Thanks! |
Have you calculated the number of miles and the number of hours for each segment? If not, use google maps to see what those times look like.
What time of year? That makes a big difference. Summer has longer days and you can fit more in - unless you want to drive from Point A to Point B in the dark. How many hours and miles are you comfortable driving? 500 miles? 8 hours? It varies from person to person. What's your comfort zone? |
What time of the year is your trip?
Utahtea |
You have planned some really unnecessarily painful days of driving for yourself. Two that jump off the page are the one from Yellowstone to Yosemite and from Sequoia to Las Vegas.
Glacier, Yellowstone, Grand Tetons and environs make a good trip, and the national parks of Utah, Arizona, and California makes a good trip. However, to combine most of these two in seventeen nights does not make for a good trip. We need to know when you are traveling so we can advise you if it at a time of year you could drive from Las Vegas to Death Valley and then over Tioga Pass to Yosemite (because this is the best way to approach Yosemite from Las Vegas. HTtY |
The time of year really impacts this trip in several ways.
If it is before mid May, only the south rim of GC will be open, so going to Bryce next adds 4 -5 hours to your travels, and Yellowstone/Grand Tetons and possibly Yosemite and Sequoia may have significant areas that are still snow covered with road closures. If you are thinking of this summer, you are late for making lodging reservations. I love a road trip but IMHO you will be spending way too much time in the car and have an optimistic view of how long it takes to get from one place to the next. I would save the California parks for another trip, or save Yellowstone/GT for another trip. |
The Trip will be in early June. I know we are late on getting the ball rolling on this. So Its a better Idea to combine Utah, Arizona and California? I have calculated the driving distances and the longest drive is 15 hours roughly which I broke into two days of travel
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June is good. Longer days.
The amount of travel is personal. I do a lot of driving and have decided my limit for "road days" is 500 miles and/or 8 hours of driving. If I do more than 2 days of that, I'm tired and grouchy on later days. I will do 10 hours of driving if I have to, but IMO it negates the reason for a road trip. Once I'm in an area I want to see, I don't like to drive more than 4 hours a day. For me (my personal experience) doing more than that is just a drive-by vacation. So to get somewhere, I'll drive 8 hours a day for a couple of days. But after that, I like to have "short days" of less than 4 hours of driving and the rest of the day seeing and doing things. What works for you, only you can decide. |
One more thought -
It depends on how active you want to be at those parks. Is this a "doing" vacation or a "driving" vacation? Only you can decide what works for you. On one trip we flew into Jackson, WY and out of Kalispell, MT. We had a bit over two weeks to see three parks - Grand Tetons, Yellowstone and Glacier. On a map, that's 813 miles and less than 14 hours of driving. We spent 1/3 of the time in the Yellowstone area, 1/3 time at a private ranch, using it as a base for seeing things most folks just drive by, and 1/3 time at Glacier. But we did a lot of driving on that trip. Although the map may indicate the drive times are doable, if I repeated the trip I'd slow down even more. At least 1.5 days we did almost nothing and just enjoyed "being" in the gorgeous place. Good luck to you as you decide what works best for you. |
Why would you spend more time at Bryce and Moab than at the Grand Canyon? You'll be flabbergasted by the Grand Canyon.
Otherwise, agree with emalloy. Do Grand Canyon and some of the Arizona canyons. We liked Zion a lot. |
Thanks for the suggestions, I have a lot of work to do
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