Southwest Road Trip

Some places you visit once. Some you go back to.

In 1991, when I was seven, my family took a road trip through the American Southwest, hitting Bryce, Zion, and the Grand Canyon. I remembered the scale, the color of the rock, the fry bread, the Kokopelli necklace I coveted in every roadside gift shop. Then there were the roadside motels, too much time in the car, and the random cast of characters you only meet on multi-day drives. There was a specific feeling of being very small in a way that didn’t feel bad at all.

I’ve always understood the concept that you can’t return to a place and find it as you left it, you can never go home again, right? Memory and reality don’t line up; and both you and the place have moved on. I understood it–I just didn’t fully believe it. It turns out the best way to test a memory is to walk (or drive) back into it with the person who made it for you, and the person you’re making it for.

So, in April, my 77-year-old dad, nine-year-old son, Abel, and I headed back to Canyon Country. I wanted Abel to experience it, as I did, in all its immensity for the first time. And I wanted my dad there to watch it happen with me.

Intrepid Travel handled everything else: transportation, logistics, small groups, local guides. In a lot of ways, it was like being a kid on that family road trip. I didn’t have to think about anything except where I was, who I was with, and what I was going to have for dinner. A trip like that is a time machine out of adulthood—the mental load disappears. What remains is just the experience and each other—three generations, one road trip.

As it turns out, some things were simply gone. The Grand Canyon’s North Rim had a brutal summer in 2025, the Dragon Bravo Fire taking the historic lodge and over 145,000 acres with it. I was different too. But I went back to find out if the feeling was still there.

We spent a surprising amount of the drive trying to reconstruct our first trip. My dad remembered the route. I remembered gift shops and motel pools. Somewhere in there was Moon House, a cliff dwelling my parents somehow managed to hike us into long before permits, GPS, or AllTrails. Between us we could piece together most of it. The rest we filled in with educated guesses. Memory, I’ve learned, is more collaborative than I realized.

You can’t relive a childhood. But if you’re lucky, you can give someone else one, with the same person who gave you yours. It turns out that’s better.

Here’s where we went. 

Springdale, UT 

Springdale is the town Zion National Park deserves: small, walkable, genuinely charming, and completely unpretentious about it. 

Start your morning at Deep Creek Coffee Co, then carry your cup across the street to Oscar’s Cafe for breakfast. Oscar’s is a colorful Springdale institution: part diner, part local gathering place, with portions that match the landscape. Go hungry. Walking in with someone else’s coffee felt very Los Angeles of me, but I own that.

For dinner, Bit & Spur Restaurant & Saloon has a large outdoor lawn and a stage, which sounds like a nice amenity until you have kids and realize it is actually essential infrastructure. The kids ran around while we sat. The sweet potato tamales and chile verde are the order, Southwestern done right. Someone had taken multicolored Solo cups, scored an X in each one with an exacto knife, and slipped them over the outdoor string lights. The whole patio glowed in color, it was festive and perfect. I am stealing this idea. 

Save room for Springdale Candy Company: bean-to-bar chocolate and housemade gelato, plus a nostalgia candy wall that includes, and I say this without apology, candy cigarettes. Some things are worth revisiting. 

The free Springdale Shuttle runs April through November, with nine stops through town connecting directly to the Zion pedestrian entrance. It runs daily from around 7 or 8am at 10-15 minute intervals. Use it. Parking inside the park fills fast and the shuttle is genuinely fun. Kids who don’t regularly ride city buses find this thrilling. 

Take it all the way to the last stop and walk to the mouth of the Narrows. Even if you don’t hike it that day, you need to see it. The Virgin River disappears into a slot canyon so narrow and tall it feels like the earth is swallowing itself. Abel wanted to keep going. My dad looked at the river, shook his head, and said, “September. We come back in September. It’s too cold now. We wouldn’t get very far.”

After we asked someone to take our picture, he smiled and said, “I took one of you, your sister, and your mom standing right about here.” Thirty-five years later, we were standing in the same spot, waiting for someone else to take the picture.

When you’re ready to come back and actually hike it, and you will come back, all the gear you need (waders, waterproof boots, walking sticks) is rentable right at the park entrance. There’s no official minimum age; the practical reality is that it depends on water levels and your kid (I did this hike when I was seven). 

Stay: Driftwood Lodge. Request a room overlooking the river. You’ll wake up to the Virgin River outside your balcony and the canyon walls beyond it. Everything looks better with a view. 

Bryce Canyon, UT 

Our next destination was Bryce, about 2 hours away. On the way, we stopped at White Mountain Trading Post, a gas station that moonlights as a surprisingly serious collection of taxidermy and turquoise jewelry. We left with a lasso, the utility of which was not yet apparent.

In Bryce Canyon City, we found a picnic table and assembled a proper ploughman’s spread—bread, hard cheese, pickles, something cured, a good knife, otherwise charcuterie before it got a publicist. Then we wandered over to Ruby’s Inn Old Bryce Town, part general store, part Western time capsule, where two employees spotted the boys and asked if they wanted to learn to rope. What followed was twenty minutes of pure, unscripted joy: kids taking turns with the lasso, practicing on a roping dummy (literally a hay stack with a plastic horse head), coached by people who were genuinely delighted to teach them. The lasso had found its calling. Can’t wait to see what we make of it in LA. 

Then the canyon itself. Bryce is different from Zion and different again from the Grand Canyon, smaller in scale but almost more surreal for it. The hoodoos rise out of the amphitheater in dense, rust-colored formations that your brain keeps trying to read as something else: organ pipes, chess pieces, a crowd of figures frozen mid-sentence. We hiked down into it, not just along the rim, which felt like the right way to see it. Wear shoes with good traction, there were a few spills.

Two things you should know before you go. First: find a Ponderosa pine and put your nose directly into the bark. I’m serious. The resin smells unmistakably of butterscotch, a function of the terpenes in the sap, which the tree produces to protect itself from fungi and herbivores. It’s one of those facts that sounds made up until you’re standing there with your face pressed against a tree and then your kid is doing the exact same thing. Second: pick up prickly pear fruit leather at the trading post before you arrive. It is the correct snack for this landscape. 

Somewhere between stops, Abel asked my dad what his favorite place had been when he was a kid. The question hung there longer than I expected. I realized I didn’t know the answer either, so I started listening more closely. Somewhere along the drive, it hit me that I’d spent years telling Abel stories about my own childhood without ever asking my dad very many about his.

My dad laughed. “Pretty minimal,” he said. There were five kids, he explained, so there wasn’t much room for travel. Then, almost in the same breath, he mentioned that when he was thirteen his father took him around the world. They planned much of the trip from an architectural history book, visiting places like Bangkok, Athens, Istanbul, Agra, and Rome. I couldn’t believe I had never asked.

What stayed with him wasn’t the monument. It was the drive there, how impossibly hot it was, and how good the cold melon tasted.

Then another story surfaced. On our first Southwest road trip, we came across a Swiss mother and her two boys whose car was hopelessly stuck in the sand. Between English, German, French, and a lot of gesturing, we spent the next few hours digging them out.

Months later, a giant box of Swiss candy arrived at our house in Berkeley. Abel wanted to know how they’d found us. There were no cell phones, no internet, no Google Maps. Maybe the phone book? We never solved that mystery.

On the drive to Page, stop at Moqui Cave, a natural history museum inside a cave that feels like it hasn’t changed in decades, in the best way. I remember going as a kid. The fossils, gems, and minerals, especially the fluorescent ones, still hold up. Some things don’t need updating.

Page, AZ 

Oh, Page. At first glance it looks like every strip mall town you’ve ever driven through and immediately forgotten. We were skeptical. I’ll admit it…we said some things. We take them back. 

Page sits at the edge of the Navajo Nation and the Colorado River, and once you stop looking at the Walmart and Safeway and start looking at everything else, it clicks. This is a base camp town. It doesn’t try to be cute. It doesn’t need to be. 

One logistical thing nobody tells you: turn off automatic time zone on your phone the minute you arrive. The Navajo Nation observes Daylight Saving Time; Arizona does not; the reservation surrounds the town on multiple sides; your phone will lose its mind. I learned this the hard way when I woke my son up at 5am. Set it manually to MST and leave it there. 

For lunch, grab sandwiches from Lake Powell Italian Deli, which imports specialty meats and cheeses directly from Italy, is proudly Arizona’s only authentic Italian deli (I did not fact check this). It makes an ideal lunch or picnic across the street in the park. It’s the kind of place that has no business being this good in this location, and that’s the whole point. Pro tip: there’s an unexpectedly excellent juice bar in the gym next door, Odyssey Fixx cafe. After ordering the #2 Kale, Spinach, Cucumber, Celery, Lemon, Parsley pressed juice, I really started feeling sheepish about any comments I had previously made. 

The real draw is the slot canyons, specifically the ones most people skip. Skip them the right way: book with Black Streak Canyon Tours, a Navajo-owned and operated company running intimate groups through Rattlesnake and Owl Canyon, the quieter, less photographed neighbors of the iconic Upper Antelope. You board a windswept open van, and then you’re in it. The walls rise around you in waves of amber and rust, carved by flash floods over millions of years into shapes that don’t look real. No videos allowed, which at first feels like a rule and then feels like a gift. Our guide Cedrik (with a k) played a flute inside the canyon and named the song on the spot. I can’t show you. You had to be there. 

In Rattlesnake Canyon, you skinny through passages narrow enough that you’re turning sideways, kids scrambling ahead. Keep your eyes on the ground: Cedrik introduced us to Moqui marbles, small iron-oxide spheres formed underground when minerals precipitated from groundwater and slowly hardened around grains of Navajo Sandstone. The kids found some, rolled them in their palms, debated whether to pocket them. Leave them. Plan ahead for which canyons you want; not all tours go to all of them, and it’s worth thinking through before you book. We did not have time to visit Upper Antelope, and while I’d experienced a version of it at the Canyon Room installation at Glossier’s now defunct Melrose outpost, I am certain it’s not the same thing. Next time.

After the canyons, swing by the Glen Canyon Dam visitor center before dinner. The park rangers here are exceptional, genuinely passionate about the land, the water, the history, and the center itself is worth more than the five minutes most people give it. I left with a Park Ranger Crochet Kit. No regrets. You can also kayak on Lake Powell from here, if you’ve got the energy left. 

For dinner: Big John’s Texas BBQ. Sit outside, order local beer, and let the old-timers playing Dylan and Lou Reed covers wash over you. It is exactly the vibe it sounds like, and it is exactly right after a day underground. 

I told Abel that my parents took me to my first concert, Bob Dylan at the Berkeley Community Theater, when I was eight. My dad still remembered lyrics I hadn’t thought about in years. Abel asked what our first concert together should be. My dad said, “The window’s narrowing if we’re going to see Bobby D together.” I found myself wondering what music he’d someday remember as the soundtrack to his childhood.

Stay: The Wesley, Page’s first boutique hotel. It’s mid-renovation, but you can tell where it’s going. It’s not the Amangiri, which is a mere 15 minutes away and a measly $5k+ more per night, if you’re in that mood. But The Wesley is the move: comfortable, considered, and definitely the place to stay. I hope the duo that is doing this renovation buys the shuttered steakhouse and cocktail lounge across the street. 

Monument Valley, AZ/UT 

My early wake-up, courtesy of the time zone situation I have already confessed to, was at least good for something. Two hours later, we were pulling into Monument Valley before the crowds. My phone said it felt like 32 degrees, I agreed. I had packed for the wrong version of this trip. Learn from me: check the forecast for each location individually and follow the packing guide. These are not the same climate. My bad. 

You can drive yourself through Monument Valley—the 17-mile Valley Drive is open to personal vehicles, but I’d strongly recommend a guided jeep tour. There are locations you simply cannot access without a Navajo guide, and Eagle Hogan is reason enough alone. Tucked into a sandstone alcove, the rock formations overhead arrange themselves into the unmistakable silhouette of an eagle’s head. Our guide had us stop and take a few shots. They’re some of my favorites from the whole trip, which I did not expect. 

This land is sacred to the Diné, the Navajo, who are its keepers and custodians, its people. It is their homeland, not a backdrop. The tour holds that. You’ll also move through country shaped by the Ancestral Puebloans, whose presence surfaces in petroglyphs and pictographs pressed into canyon walls, and in the ghost outlines of cliff dwellings that somehow still stand. The buttes and arches you’ve seen in a hundred Westerns and car commercials were real locations long before any camera arrived. 

Abel wasn’t satisfied with knowing what something was. He wanted to know who made it, how we knew, and what happened to the people who once lived here. My dad happily met him there. The more Abel asked, the more stories my dad seemed to have. I got to do something I don’t often get to do as a parent: listen.

Lunch was Navajo tacos, eaten in the shadow of the buttes. Before you leave, find the little café near the Three Sisters formation for coffee and fry bread. Browse the small stands and shops within the park for dream catchers and jewelry; what you find here was made here. 

One more thing, for those with more time than we had: Monument Valley Hogan Camping. Spend the night in a traditional Navajo hogan, a domed structure built from desert juniper logs, bark, and red earth, cool in summer and warm in winter, with a sunset jeep tour, campfire folk tales, flute playing and dancing, Reserve well in advance; same-day bookings aren’t accepted, and it’s popular for good reason. 

Grand Canyon, AZ 

There is nothing I can tell you about the Grand Canyon that the Grand Canyon will not tell you better in person. You already know it’s big; but you don’t know how big until you’re standing at the rim and your brain quietly gives up trying to process it. We arrived at sunset, walked the rim, and that was enough, enough to see it, enough to know we’d barely scratched the surface, enough to start thinking about when to come back. 

Elk wander the South Rim freely, past the gift shop, through the parking lot, across the path in front of you, completely unbothered. The kids froze every time. So did I. 

At 5:30pm, I watched two men shoulder their packs and start their descent into the canyon. I asked what their plan was. Down for the night, to stargaze from the bottom. I have thought about this every day since. It is going on the list. 

Abel borrowed my camera to take a picture, looked at it, and said, “That’s not it.” My dad smiled. “I’ve been trying to take that picture for forty years.” We all knew exactly what he meant.

Stay and eat at El Tovar. Built in 1905 and sitting directly on the rim, it is one of America’s great national park lodges. These places were built to be inside the experience, not adjacent to it. You fall asleep to the canyon and wake up to it. The dining room has been serving guests for over a century; get a window table at dusk and you’ll understand why. Book both the room and the restaurant well before your trip. They go fast, and they are worth it.

Seligman, AZ — Route 66 

The last stop before the return to Las Vegas was the one I didn’t expect to love as much as I did. 

Seligman, Arizona is the town that inspired Radiator Springs in Pixar’s Cars, and once you’re there, it’s immediately obvious why. Vintage vehicles line the street (now with painted eyes on their windshields). Colorful storefronts, neon signs, kitschy roadside Americana in every direction. It is deeply, joyfully weird, and the kids loved it. 

The place to stop is Delgadillo’s Snow Cap, a drive-in built in 1953 by Juan Delgadillo out of scrap lumber from the nearby railway yard, now run by his family and holding a Guinness World Record for most milkshake flavors on display (order a milkshake). The Delgadillo family were personally consulted by Pixar when John Lasseter came through studying Route 66; both Juan and his brother Angel appear in the Cars credits. You are drinking a milkshake inside a movie. It’s a good milkshake. 

Then just walk. Up and down the street, no agenda. The storefronts are colorful and cluttered and cheerful. The old cars watch you go. It was the last stop before Las Vegas, which meant it was over — and somehow that made me want to take stock of the whole thing.

Our group spanned from nine-year-olds to grandparents, and you never quite know how that dynamic will go. Ours clicked—somewhere between ‘70s playlists, 53 rounds of “99 Bottles of Beer” and games of hangman, we found our rhythm. My dad passed his Hastings triplet hand lens around so everyone could examine the rock up close. Some of that dynamic is luck. But Intrepid Travel builds these trips intentionally. It shows in the people you end up next to.

We’re already planning the return. Abel and I have our eyes on the Narrows, the full hike this time, not just the mouth of it, and we’ve entered the lottery for a night at Phantom Ranch, the only lodging at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, accessible only on foot or by mule. It books out a year in advance if you’re lucky enough to get a spot. That feels about right for a place worth waiting for. There aren’t many seasons of life when your parent is still up for a trip like this, and your child is still young enough to reach for your hand. I was lucky enough to catch one. I’m going to try to catch another.

You don’t get your childhood back. But you do get to watch it happen again.