We woke up at the ridiculous time of 7:00am, to get on the road to Willow Flat campground in the Island In The Sky district of Canyonlands National Park. This little 10 site campground is a lovely place within the park to stay and is, unusually for national parks, first come first serve. This is particularly nice, because reservation sites at national park campgrounds go in minutes six months out. That said, it is also a crap shoot as to whether you find a space, and the Moab area is a very competitive camping area unless you are interested in free dispersed camping options in BLM areas. These are not bad in and of themselves, but aren’t usually good for tent camping and have no “facilities”. We have learned from experience that arriving at first come first serve campgrounds mid to late morning (before 11:00am), is the best one can do.

We stopped for a minute in the town of Price to grab a pickup order of camping supplies at Walmart, some drive through breakfast, and then rolled the two hours southeast to Canyonlands. Arriving precisely at 10:51 (as Maps had told us we would two hours before) we found available the same site we had and loved last year. We paid for five nights, pitched our car camping palace, set up camp, and then headed the 40 minutes into Moab for lunch, a few more supplies, and to pick up a few weeks worth of dehydrated meals Theresa cooked up and shipped general delivery before we left.

We returned very late afternoon and settled in for the night. Dinner skipped due to a late lunch, we made the short walk down to the Green River overlook for a view and watched the finale of White Lotus in our mobile home theater before calling it a very successful day.