Family Vacation to Scottsdale

Back in February, I was invited to be a part of a blogger campaign to discover Scottsdale, Arizona. It's about an 11 hour drive, but I figured it would be a good chance to take a family vacation for cheap. We had a stipend to spend and still spent some out of pocket, but not much. Because the drive was so long, I wish that we would have stayed more than 2 days. We spent half our trip driving. We left Sunday after church and came home Wednesday. Sunday we took a couple detours and it ended up taking us even longer to get there.  I can't believe how incredibly patient the boys were and although they got restless at times, they did great.  We arrived at like 11 pm and we were all tired and ready to be out of the van.  I had booked a hotel on hotwire for $60 a night and it happened to be a place that was probably used as apartments once upon a time since a lot of the suites had full kitchens, living rooms, etc.  When we got to our room, the lights were on, it looked like someone had been laying on the bed, there were some food items on the counter.  We thought we had walked into someone else's room.  They ended up relocating us to a different room with 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, full kitchen, washer/dryer.  It was nice!  We all had our own beds and the boys loved that they had a room all to themselves.  The resort that we
stayed at had 4 different pools, and we had fun swimming in a couple of them.The weather was high 70's and with a heated pool, it was absolutely perfect.


     


 Our first day that we were there, we spent the morning and some of the afternoon at Goldfield Ghost Town. It's about an hour from Scottsdale and has so much to offer. Our first stop was ride the Superstition Narrow Gauge Railroad. It was a 20 minute tour around the Ghost Town were we learned about the town, when it was popular, more about mining and more.

After the railroad, we had a mine tour where we rode down a shaft into a mine. Rowan needed a bit of convincing, I think it reminded him of the Hollywood Tower of Terror at California Adventure.  It was a mistake taking him on that ride when we went to Disney last year.  He thought it was cool once he realized it wasn't scary. We learned about mining, the tools they used and more.  

 

 Next, we were on to the Mystery Shack. This one was really fun and was a house built on angles. You could stand straight up at an angle, water went up instead of down, and brooms stood by themselves. Lastly, we enjoyed lunch at the Mammoth Steakhouse and Saloon. The boys loved the Sarsparillas and lunch was yummy!

After the Ghost Town, we spent the afternoon at the pool.

Our next adventure was to go to Dave & Buster's. It was our first time at a Dave & Busters. I had a steak that was absolutely amazing and the boys had a great time playing games and winning tickets to redeem for prizes. It was definitely a very family friendly place. You can eat and play a lot of really amazing arcade games all in one place. The boys loved getting tickets and redeemed for candy, slinkies and finger lights.

 

After we left Dave & Busters, I wanted to run over to The Children's Place quickly.  I picked out some clothes for Nova (baby girl's name) and I about died at all of the cute little girl's stuff.  I'm having a hard time not going overboard and I already have 2 big bags full of clothes for her from Children's Place, Carters and Gymboree.  Needless to say, she's going to be one spoiled little girl.

The next day, we headed to the Phoenix zoo. There was so much to offer there. We were there for 4 hours and the boys were so tired from walking although we hadn't seen everything. We rode around the zoo with a guided tour, got to touch sting rays, and rode the carousel multiple times.

We couldn't leave Scottsdale without heading downtown to see what it was all about. It had a country western feel and is nice and clean. We grabbed some sweets at The Sugar Bowl and they definitely did not disappoint!

Wednesday we spent the day driving and made good time.  It was such a fun family vacation!