San Diego, California, St. George, Utah
By Svara Jayasinghe
For the week of November 23rd-29th, my family decided to go on a road trip to Utah to visit three national parks. Because of COVID, we had been cooped up in our house for the past 8 months, and needed to get out of the house. Visiting national parks seemed like the safest thing to do as we would be outside, and could stay away from people. On Monday we drove from San Diego California to St. George Utah. The drive was supposed to be around six hours so we planned to leave early in the morning to get to St. George at a good time. However, our dad forgot to pick up our rental car the day before because he had mixed up the pick-up times and didn’t have the car to leave as early as we had planned. We rented our van from Enterprise Rent-a-Car in Escondido. We were a bit disappointed in the service. They took more than an hour to clean and prepare our car and even then it wasn’t completely clean. When dad brought the car home, we packed and set out at 10 A.M., almost 4-5 hours than we had planned.
An hour and a half into the drive we stopped at a Macy’s at the Mall of Victorville to stretch our legs. We got Starbucks, hung around for a little bit while our mom shopped, and then got back on the road. A little while later, we stopped again at the Outlets at Barstow. Our parents shopped and looked around, while my sisters and I stayed in the car watching a Christmas movie (Noelle) on our laptops. Once we got back on the road, we continued driving and stopped a couple of times at rest stops to stretch our legs, and eventually made it to our hotel at around 8 P.M.. The hotel (at Hampton Inn and Suites in St. George) was nice and looked like it had been built recently. We got two separate rooms, parents in one, kids in another, which made it even nicer. The room was very spacious and clean. Once we settled in, our dad brought us dinner from Arby’s, and we ate and relaxed in the room.
