Day 5 Route 66 & Grand Canyon

Last night we stayed at our favorite hotel chain, Hampton Inn & Suites. It's a Hilton brand which we love, the price is between $79 and $149 per night, and there is a full hot breakfast in the morning including make your own belgian waffles. When you have children, especially 3 of them, it is way too expensive to go out to breakfast during your vacation. Most days we have had 1 or 2 meals plus snacks and save a TON of money. After our yummy breakfast, we checked out and got on Route 66 to find the inspiration for the Cars movies, "Peach Springs."

Power House in Kingman, AZ with a huge elevated railroad track

Come to find out, Peach Springs is no more than an old town with a few homes, and a couple businesses. There was no Cars fun to be found. However, the towns of Hackberry and Stilgeman are full of Americana, and cute references to the Cars movies including look-alike cars with eyes and all.

Mater's Buddy



Hackberry

Hangin' with the locals

"Look! These are chairs!" ~Mikey

Old School Tree Swing

We even passed a motel called the "Cozy Corner" that looked like the Cozy Cone, but it was located closer to Hackberry than Peach Springs. Of course, we never located Lightning MacQueen so Mikey was bummed out. We told him he was probably racing somewhere and coming back to hang out with Mater asap ; )

Tow Mater waiting for his best friend to get back

Americana :)

After an awesome lunch in Stilgeman, we continued our trip to the Grand Canyon. It was breathtaking and the highlight of our roadtrip so far. Just so you know, you don't have to buy any fancy expensive tours to have fun in the Grand Canyon! We had stopped in a gift shop on our way, and the lady told us there are no cars allowed at a certain point and we'd have to get one of the tour packages in the pamphlet she gave us. It was very misleading and would have been unaffordable for our family of 5. Needless to say, we had a phenomenal time and paid only $25, the fee to enter the National Park.

Ranger Books

 The best part of this day was that we not only saw the Grand Canyon for the first time, but we were there at the perfect time to hike for awhile, see an amazing sunset, and enjoy and photograph the views right after sunset.

Buds

 So romantic ;)

So beautiful it looks like a fake background, right?

We had a long drive to our hotel in Flagstaff, and we passed on the gross fast food on the way because it was twice the price of the same chain back home. So after we checked in, we rushed over to the only open fast food place, and got some not so healthy, but inexpensive dinner. This was our longest roadtrip day yet, but so worth it!