DAY 8 – Las Vegas to Springdale (Zion) (167 miles driven, 5.72 miles walked)
We left Vegas early this morning and to be honest I wasn’t sorry. I think that the issue for me this visit was that we simply tried to do too much in a short space of time. We didn’t give the place or ourselves any time to breathe.
One of the joys of a holiday such as this is that you get to see so much but the flip side of that is that you are constantly on the move. The good news is that the next two stops are both for two nights which will give us a better chance to explore and a break from the car.
Today we made our way to a place called Springdale right on the entrance to Zion national park. Springdale is a typical American town with a very untypical backdrop. Like so many places we have driven through on our tours through the US this is a small town with one major road through it with shops on either side. There seems to be no centre or heart to the town but the scenery and backdrop of the Zion park that runs either side frames it nicely. As an example the picture above is the view from our hotel room door.
Compared to somewhere like Yosemite Zion is a relatively small park and because of this you are discouraged from driving in and parts of the park are even off limits to private vehicles. Instead the park has laid on free shuttle buses with two separate routes – one runs from the far end of town to the park gate and the other from the park gate to the far end of the park. A concern was that the buses wouldn’t be that frequent and you’d spend quite a bit of time queueing and waiting but that turned out not to be the case as they were everywhere. I’m not sure if this is because today also happened to be National Public Lands Day and entrance to the park was free so attracted more people. I guess that we will find out tomorrow when the entrance fee is back again.
Talking of money each park charges a fee to enter. Typically this is in the $20-$30 range and gives entrance to one car and up to four passengers. When you are visiting so many parks the fees can quickly rack up so we have bought an annual pass which cost us $80 and we have made our mony back already so it has been a good investment.
Knowing what you are going to pay for anything is a bit hit and miss here and the amount shown for a meal/hotel/shop is never what you actually pay. Tonight in a very nice restaurant we had calculated what we thought was the total only to then find tax added and then the tip on top of that too. Walking back from the meal we stopped in a gift shop to buy a $4.99 fridge magnet only for it suddenly become $5.39 with tax. There was me with my five dollar note at the ready then having to scrabble around for some additional lose change. But the biggest annoyance is hotel prices which, I assume in order to keep the headline price low, charge an ‘amenity fee’ on arrival. This additional charge can be as much as $40 a night, isn’t optional and includes things that you are unlikely to use, such as access to the business centre. All practices annoy me but why tax isn’t shown by law included in the price I will never understand.
Tomorrow I am looking forward to exploring the park and not worrying about such minor annoyances!