Write about a place that you visited over the summer.
Last summer, I got to go on a trip to three of the four corner states and Texas. We drove to the anchorage airport and took a flight to Seattle, where we changed flights and flew into Phoenix, AZ. When we got off the plane, we picked our bags up at baggage claim and then trekked off to the pick up area for travelers. We got in an Uber that we had rented and our driver took us to the car rental building. We rented a minivan and then climbed inside. It was super nice! There were shades for the windows and seats that reclined and armrests. There was air conditioning and a really nice radio with lots of stations. The car had cup holders and controls for everything. My family and I all felt really tired, so we started the long drive to Tempe -a city next to Phoenix- so we could check into our hotel. While my parents navigated their way through the highways and exits and traffic, my sister leaned back in her chair and I reclined and tried to get some sleep.
As we were nearing the hotel, we all decided that we were hungry and wanted dinner, so we stopped at Tocaya, a modern Mexican restaurant. My sister and I ordered tacos, and my mom and dad ordered bowls. By the time the waiter came with our food, my mouth was watering and my stomach grumbling in anticipation. I dug into my tacos. They were the best thing I ever tasted! The beef taco was my favorite, and then the fish taco. My family dared me to eat the slice of lime on my plate, so I tried it. It was sour, but not bad at all! After dinner, we drove to our hotel and checked in. When we got to our room, we set our bags down and got ready for bed.
The next day was nice and relaxing: we slept in, watched TV, ate breakfast at the self serve area in the hotel, swam in the hotel pool, went for a walk near the hotel, and ate at Tocaya. It was really hot! The whole time we were there, the temperature never went below 100ºF. We drank a lot of iced water from our bottles, and had to refill plenty of times. It was so hot, we spent most of the day inside the hotel or a restaurant. The next few days we spent driving around and getting to our destination. Our next stop was Antelope Canyon.
We drove to Page, AZ, where we found a hotel not even a mile from the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River. While we were staying in Page, we drove to the place where we were supposed to go for a tour of the slot canyons in Antelope Canyon. My family and I met our guide and started the tour. We walked down, away from the blazing heat and into the cool, relieving slot canyon. Our tour was 400 meters long, and we walked the whole way, all the while admiring rocks that look like figures, how awesome the canyon looked when you turned your eyes upward to the light, and awesome pictures the tour guide took of us. When the tour was over, we spent another night in Page and we visited the breathtaking dam and the visitor center made for it.
When we left Page, we made our way to Canyon de Chelly (pronounced Canyon do-shea) and got to see the most amazing sights. We spotted nearly invisible homes built into the cliff walls by the Mesa Verdeans after they left Mesa Verde and amazingly tall rock statues. We drove from lookout to lookout, stopping at each and every one and taking hours to make it around the section of the canyon we were visiting. The blazing heat was unforgiving and unrelenting. After admiring Canyon de Chelly, we set out to the place we had been anticipating to go to, the one we had planned this whole trip because of: Chaco Canyon.
My family and I had been driving for hours in the white minivan we had rented. There was no sign of anything but long, endless desert. I was listening to audiobooks on my phone and playing games. Nothing interesting had happened since we got on the road and I felt carsick and we had to stop for a while. I looked up from my phone to see if anything had changed. Nothing. I went back to my game. A few minutes later I looked up again and saw a massive rock pillar as we drove past it. “What was that rock thing?” I asked my parents. “We’re not that far from Monument Valley!” My mom answered. I looked out the window a couple miles off the road and saw the biggest pillars of rock I had ever seen! They towered above anything that stood to challenge them, and they seemed majestic and had an air of authority. A few minutes later, my sight of them was blocked yet again by tall rocks next to the road.
We had made it. Chaco Canyon. The whole reason my family planned this trip. My dad, mom, sister and I made our way through the sudden change between flat, ever expanding desert to massive cliff walls on all sides of us. During our time in Chaco Canyon, we stopped at ruins of Chaco society called Pueblos. They were D-shaped buildings that the ancient Puebloans used to live in and survive in. We even got to go to a place in Chaco Canyon called Aztec Ruins (the ruins got their name because the architects who found them thought they were from the Aztecs) and enjoy more ruins.
After Chaco, we stopped at Saguaro National Park to appreciate the enormous cacti that grew there. Some of them were hundreds of years old! There was also the occasional bird nest burrowed into a cactus. Next, we went to Bandelier National Park. It was kind of like Canyon de Chelly and Mesa Verde, and the homes were built by the same people, but the homes were around a mile long each, and you could even go inside of some of them! Bandelier was also different because the homes weren’t built in a natural crevasse in the rock and you couldn’t see the roofs. In fact, there were no roofs! The long houses blended into the rock and the only way you could tell they were there were the windows along the side of the house you were facing. There were bugs were all over the place, too!
The next place we were going to stay was Santa Fe. The trip was five hours long without stopping! After what felt like two or three hours, our car rolled into the town of Roswell. Roswell is a place that is in the middle of nowhere, and nothing exciting ever happens there. It’s pretty boring. The people in Roswell liked to keep themselves entertained, but there isn’t anything important happening there. The residents of the town did it with aliens. There were statues and cardboard pictures and signs with aliens on them. There was even a museum about aliens. The museum had stories about aliens and government conspiracies and the U.S military finding aliens in Roswell and trying to cover it up! I however, didn’t believe a word of it.
After getting a bite to eat, we drove the rest of the way to Santa Fe. Santa Fe had a lot of history and plenty of statues. When we got into the Capitol of New Mexico, we navigated to our hotel and checked in. It was extremely fancy! The rest of the trip flew by. We spent the night in our hotel in Santa Fe and then we left the next day. We drove along the border of Texas and through Arizona to get back to Tempe. We stayed in Tempe for two days and went to the best waterpark ever, and then drove to the airport in Phoenix so we could go home. We flew into Juneau, Alaska, and then into Anchorage. We drove home and after unpacking, enjoyed the rest of the summer.
