I travel a lot but this was particular trip was the longest by far. The drive to the first destination took 32 hours and it didn’t help that there was my baby sister who was almost one year old and my grandmother who has never been on a trip that lasted more than 9 hours. The trip had 4 main stops: The Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Tijuana Mexico. We stayed in The Grand Canyon for three days camping and it was the first time I’ve ever been truly camping. We stayed in Las Vegas for three days and spent most of our time in casinos playing the games. We spent one and a half days in Los Angeles sightseeing. When we went to Mexico we only stayed that afternoon because we didn’t want to risk anything. The drive back had its own stories such as driving through the desert with the heat of 130 F and it started to rain midday, it started to rain which caused the temperate to drop to 60 F.

The Grand Canyon is full of beautiful nature such as the animals like the deer elk that freely walk around. The first night that we camped our inflatable mattress popped so we had to sleep on the hard floor. I shared a tent with my nana and brother and all they wanted to do is argue with each other. When we woke up there were deer and elks walking around our tents and it’s amazing how big the elks are. Since we didn’t have a kitchen most of our food was either sandwiches, burgers, or McDonald’s. On our last full day there me, my dad, and my brothers hiked almost all the way to the bottom of the canyon but when we were about 3 miles away from it I started to get really bad heat exhaustion and almost fell off a cliff twice. The fact that we started the descend on the hottest day of the year during the hottest part of the day wasn’t helping us. It was so much hard to go up the canyon than going down and there wasn’t much shade.

After leaving the Grand Canyon we drove to Las Vegas which was beautiful. We stayed in a condo that belonged to a woman that my father worked with and since we were guest we got special treat meant such as a larger condo because the owners were hoping that it would result in my family being interested in buying a membership. While there we many were walking to all the casinos and sightseeing. All the casinos we went to had sections dedicated to arcade games which were fun and Dillan (my brother) and I wasted a lot of money on the games. It was the 4th of July while we were there but the night we were hoping to see the fireworks they got canceled due to the planes in the area. Surprisingly there weren’t any Elvis impersonators the entire time we were there which was a huge disappointment for my nana who loves Elvis.

The last place we stayed at overnight was Los Angeles and the traffic to get anywhere was so terrible. We went to was Santa Monica and the Santa Monica pier; even though it was mid-July the beach ocean and the area surrounding it was really cold due to the Pacific winds. We had also driven past Beverly Hills which took us almost an hour due to the amount of traffic that collected around the area. The main place we wanted to go look at was The Hollywood Walk of Fame and the Hollywood sign but we ended up spending the majority of our day on the Walk of Fame which was fun and I got several pictures.

Our last stop was Tijuana Mexico but we only stayed there during the daytime. While going through boarded control there were several things that had concerned me like the fact that my brother’s passport had the wrong gender on it, they only checked our bags on the way out of America and not back in, and how invested the lady at the desk on my way back into America was in my childhood. On the other side of the border, there was so much poverty and filth, people just running around not caring if they ran into taxi traffic, and people constantly yelling at us to buy something. When we had finally gotten to downtown Tijuana things did not improve, people wanted to sell us all kinds of things, alcohol was cheap, and you could buy drugs that in America you would have to have a prescription to get. We had eaten at an amazing restaurant that was western themed, I don’t remember what I ordered. Tijuana was an interesting place to be and my family has no intentions of heading back to Mexico but it was quite the experience.

It took us two days to get back and we only stopped at a hotel for 3 hours. People like my nana who think vacations are for relaxing shouldn’t go now trips with my family because we go big or either don’t go at all. My parents believe that vacations are meant to go and experience things not lay down and relax because if you want to go do that you could stay at home and not waste your money. We go on several vacations a year and this year we have gone on 7 trips and still have more to go. I recommend doing something similar.