In the morning, we left Moab for Lake Powell, where we would camp in the same spot for two nights. Our plans for that area were pretty flexible, and we were all looking forward to water.

We left Moab at 9am and stopped for gas 3 times. THREE TIMES. Then we drove 3 hours to Four Corners. They’ve really streamlined the tourism there. For $5 a person, you can enter, stand in line, and take 3 photos at the marked place where all four corners touch. Kacey and Allison did some cool backbend/full wheel stuff, and we grabbed a picture together.

Then it was time to plug in our campsite at Lake Powell into the GPS. Well. We were staying at Halls Corner, and our GPS told us that it would be a 5-hour drive PLUS a ferry trip. My question to you is, can you fit a massive RV on a ferry? This was some crazy Oregon Trail type nonsense, and we all knew by this point that 5 hours on a GPS is more like 7 in an RV.

The icing on the cake was that the site was a dry one, with no hookup, so we’d be all dirty and without electricity on top of all that.

We tried calling. Kacey sat on hold for over 15 minutes before having a conversation that went like this:

K: Hi! We’re headed to Halls Corner. Our GPS is saying we need to take a ferry. Is that true?

Young, Confused Teenager: Uh…a ferry? Uh…uh…I guess yeah, you do. Or you could not take the ferry. You could drive. That would add an extra two hours.

K: Two hours!?

YCT: Yeah. But the ferry works.

K: And is Halls Corner an easy drive from Lake Powell?

YCT: Uh…uh…let me see. Uh…no. It’s 5 hours from there, too.

Basically, unless you take a ferry, you have to drive AROUND everything, which adds a ton of time. We had a 6am tour of Antelope Canyon booked the next morning, so waking up at 1am to get there was obscene.

K: And are there any other campsites available?

YCT: Uh, I don’t know.

We also learned here that there are no numbers for the individual campsites near Lake Powell. They’re owned by some Aramark corporation, so you call Aramark and get a clueless human who is unsure of reservations or directions.

Meanwhile, I decided to call the ferry company to see if they’d be running when we got there. Instead, I got an automated voice message: the ferry was not running all weekend due to maintenance.

Somehow, we managed to get a hold of Wahweap, a campground right on the lake, and somehow, by some insane miracle, they had tons of dry sites. Like, 15 dry sites. Why the man at Aramark was unable to tell us this is beyond us.

So we braced for our long drive down. Kacey had the unenviable task of driving a 3-mile stretch of road through a canyon – downhill, unpaved, steep grades. A sign strongly suggested that RVs should not take this road, but…oops.

The upside was that we emerged into a green valley with red canyons and rock formations, aptly named Valley of the Gods. It was incredible.

Kacey and I swapped driving duties, and I had the pleasure of driving through Monument Valley, which I’d only seen on Once Upon a Time in the West.

I was exhausted by the time we reached Wahweap. We all were. Driving all day long through baking Utah heat in a slow-moving RV with poor suspension is not the most fun thing in the world.

I popped out to check us in, and a kind woman greeted me with even kinder information: “We have a full hook-up site available if you want it.”

IF we want it. Uh, yes. We want it. It was a wave of joy at the end of a long day. We’d have water, we’d have electricity.

Even better, our site was fancier than the other RV sites we’d stayed in. Perched on a little hill with a view of the lake and a dusky sky, the site could’ve been its own little home. Allison read my exhaustion perfectly.

“We are plugging in the RV. You get a seltzer and go sit outside while I make dinner,” she said.

So I sat at our site’s little picnic table, sipped a spiked seltzer, and watched the cool sunset, relishing in the fact that we would spend the next two days in one place.

Sunset at Lake Powell.