Living: the ultimate team sport

When things don’t go as planned

Posted on January 26, 2017 Updated on February 3, 2017

We’ve all been there. We lay out our carefully orchestrated plans – thinking we’ve arranged for every contingency – and then we find ourselves facing a roadblock for which we hadn’t planned. Yowza! Now what? My husband and I had that experience during a recent week-long Arizona trip. We flew into Las Vegas, NV, only using that locale as our arrival and departure location; no overnights.

The planned itinerary:

• 4 nights in Lake Havasu City, AZ to visit family. CHECK! And we had a delightful time as planned;
• 2 nights in Sedona, AZ to hike and experience all that this mystic location had to offer. NOPE! A snow storm changed those plans.
• 2 nights in the Grand Canyon, AZ area after Sedona. NOPE! A snow storm changed those plans as well.

We switched to a Plan B itinerary:

• 3 nights in Desert Hot Springs, CA to complete several hikes in Joshua Tree National Park. NOPE! Torrential rain and flooding.

We spent 2 nights in Desert Hot Springs and managed to squeeze in one hike before the monsoon descended. We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves but we cut our visit short.

Plan C itinerary:

• 2 nights in Las Vegas, NV. CHECK!

When circumstances proved out of our control – and certainly weather falls into that category – we knew there was no sense in getting upset and raising our blood pressure over the whole matter; flexibility was the order of the day. If all those weather events hadn’t “interrupted” our vacation itinerary, we would have never had the opportunity to hike at Red Rock Canyon in Nevada. This place is so beautiful, that we decided to hike there two days in a row. The photos included in this blog are from that experience.

We’ll return to Arizona some time in the future to fulfill our Sedona and Grand Canyon bucket list items … but then again, who knows what places we’ll actually visit should Mother Nature decide to come along with us on our vacation once again.