Arizona | Flagstaff

This is the point in the trip when our plans started to get a little derailed and we just had to go with the flow. We woke up pretty early, decided that we'd wait until Flagstaff to eat, and hit the road north.

Instead of taking the freeway, we decided to take 89A, which was definitely a more scenic route! We drove up these crazy switchback roads that had awesome views of the surrounding landscape. I'd highly recommend that route if you're not crunched for time.

While driving through Flagstaff I made the boys stop at Chick-fil-A for breakfast. We don't have any by us in Michigan (though they are coming!) so we had never had it before. I wouldn't give it 5 stars or anything, but it's definitely worth stopping at if you're driving by one. By this point the weather started to get really crappy; cold, a rain/snow mix, and foggy. Since we were still quite a drive away we continued on towards the Canyon. About an hour and half later this is what we found...

A brick wall of fog. UGH! We could not believe that we had traveled all this way to see nothing. Literally nothing! We walked around the El Tavor Hotel for a little while, checking out the decor and gift shop. Since it didn't look like the weather was going to lighten up we decided to head back down to Flagstaff and try again the next day. This meant another 3 hours of driving, but what can you do? Thankfully we were able to be flexible and in the end still got to experience it. What a story though!

So what do you do when it's really crappy outside, but you're on vacation and don't want to mope around? You go brewery/bar hopping! We spent the rest of the evening eating and drinking our way through Flagstaff, which happened to have a great bar scene. That shouldn't be too surprising though since it's a college town. We closed down the brewery and then headed to our airbnb for the night.

The next morning we woke up early and grabbed breakfast at an awesome bagel/coffee shop, Biff Bagels. It had an great view of the mountain and personal photos of dogs everywhere, my kind of place. Some of us weren't feeling the greatest so it was a long and quiet ride back to the Canyon, but it was SO worth it! That recap will be up next :)