Day 85: Birthday and Cathedrals

We started the morning off with a pre-birthday celebration for Rob. My mom is incredible; after we went to bed at 11 last night she started making him a cake and decorating so we could have an early birthday party for him. The kids were so excited to hear the plan when they woke up. Rob and I were so surprised by all she did after we went to sleep last night!

Today we picked up the RV from the overflow parking lot and started the repacking process. Since we were so short on water when we arrived, I’d brought dirty dishes, laundry, groceries, everything into her house so it all had to go back in today. Rob installed a new vent cover (the plastic on the original ones is getting very brittle from all the UV light exposure) and has one more to go. We had also replaced the burnt out “porch light”, so that’s now working again, too.

Loading took awhile, but it went really well. It’s been nice to not have the RV completely full, so we can take extra things people have given us and that we’ve bought along the way.

We then drove the 2+ hours to Sedona, our overnight stop. We only booked a spot last night, so we ended up 20 minutes away from downtown at Dead Horse Ranch State Park (ideally we would be in the campground in town). We got set up, then the kids did some bike riding to get some energy out while we made lunch.

Next we headed out for a hike. The Cathedral Rock Trail hike was marked as 1.3 miles and “moderate difficulty” with 4.8 stars from 4.5k reviewers in AllTrails. Parking there was insane; they even had an officer that made everyone keep moving instead of waiting. We looped around to the end of the road after both tiny lots were full. Our good parking luck continued–when we got back to the lot, someone was leaving.

The hike did not disappoint. We were so proud of the kids; they didn’t complain once, even though we all noticed that hiking and climbing in a mask is really tough. Nicholas continuously thanked me for finding this hike, since he just loved scrambling up and sliding down the rocks here. He’d never previously thanked me for a hike.

We drove through Sedona after, just to take a look at the actual town. It was packed with so many cars and people. As we were driving out of town, there was a multi-mile backup of cars trying to get into town. We were glad to be heading out of town and still have no idea where all those people were going to go once they got there.

Rob made us a delicious dinner when we got home, and then we worked on getting ready for another drive day tomorrow. We all decided this is a beautiful part of the country that we would love to come back and visit again post-COVID.