TWO states in ONE day (Arizona & Utah) | Lone Rock Beach, Fried Chicken, & the Toadstool Hoodoos

Well we've had a slight change of plans for today. Surprise we're headed to Arizona. If you missed our last video we have moved back into our van full-time and have relocated to southern Utah for the next couple months. Southern Utah is home to some of the craziest scenery in the United States with canyons, insane rock formations, lakes, arches, national parks, sand dunes, and so much more. And to kick off this weekend's adventuring we're heading to Lake Powell which is a man-made reservoir on the Colorado River located in both northern Arizona and southern Utah. We are heading to an area of Lake Powell called Lone Rock Beach which is on the Utah side of the lake. We heard that you can boondock on the beach for $14 a night which sounded like a really good deal. The only issue is not getting stuck on the beach. We're hoping this experience goes as smooth as it did on Padre Island in Texas. We made it into the Lone Rock Beach area and as we paid I asked the ranger at the front what her advice was on getting down there and she basically said she wouldn't do it if she was if she was us. She said that we'd be fine clearance wise but since it's been windy though some of the soft sand has gone over onto some of the roads that go down there the hard pack sand. But we're parked in this parking lot and we're gonna walk down there to scope it out. We see some pretty large RVs down there so we know it's possible but we're gonna go check out try to find a way down there. After walking down to the beach not really worried about it at all. The road down here is basically like a gravel road and the beach is way rockier than what I would expect for a beach. This is like not hard concrete like I was gonna say but it's pretty firm. You wouldn't, I don't see how you'd get stuck on this. Let's not say that too soon. Yeah yeah. Knock on wood somewhere. So after further investigation there's a whole other level below the area that we're walking on that is sand. So we think people normally go down there but everyone's staying up here right now. But we're feeling really good about it so we're gonna do it and we're gonna hope that we don't have to film another sit down we made a mistake little monologue. Don't get stuck, don't get stuck. Check out this sick spot we got. We have front row seats to the lone rock. So a little bit of history and fun facts for you about Lake Powell. As we mentioned earlier it's a man-made reservoir not a natural lake and the lake was created in 1963 when they closed two tunnels on the Glen Canyon Dam to fill up Glen Canyon with water forming a lake. The lake gets its water from snowpack in the upper Colorado River basin and it took 17 years for the lake to fill up to its highest point which is 3,700 feet above sea level and it's now the second largest man-made lake in the U.S. However its water levels do fluctuate often due to droughts. The lake is 186 miles long and has over 2,000 miles of shoreline which is longer than the entire west coast of the United States which is just absolutely crazy to think about. We wanted to show you guys more of the beach and lake but it's kind of a weird weather day. It was really windy earlier and it's kind of cold and a windstorm actually blew through. Sand going everywhere, the van was rocking, it was pretty intense. So we're gonna hang out in the van for the evening and then hopefully tomorrow we can get out on Lake Powell. Well we've had a slight change of plans for today. Our original plan was to take our new inflatable kayak out onto Lake Powell, go kayak through one of the canyons that's right here and kind of redeem, well definitely hopefully redeem, our last kayaking experience but we've been up for a few hours now just like watching the weather and it's just not looking too good for right now. Yeah it would not be a fun day out on the lake on the kayak just too cold and rainy so in the spirit of 2020 we miss it so much we're just gonna pivot and we're just gonna do some exploring of the area around here. Surprise! We're headed to Arizona. As we mentioned earlier Lake Powell is in both Utah and Arizona and Lone Rock Beach is basically right on the border of Utah and Arizona so we're hopping over to Page Arizona which is about 15 minutes away. And bonus we get an extra hour in our day because Arizona is on a different time zone but I guess we'll lose it when we come back to Utah later today so it'll all even out. There's not a whole lot you can do on a rainy nasty day in an outdoorsy type area so what do you do? You can always eat. So we came to a place called Birdhouse in Page to get some fried chicken. Oh yeah! So at Birdhouse you can get different types or pieces of chicken, thighs, tenders, breasts, yada yada. So I got three thighs and you can also get three different flavors so they have original, honey butter, and extra spicy. And for me I got a very balanced meal of french fries. Birdhouse isn't necessarily a place I can eat much or anything at but I can have fries and they have the crinkle cut style fry and there's seasons they have tons of little spices on there. Oh yeah those are really really good fries. I am a thousand percent stealing a few nibbles of the chicken though because it looks so good but I'm not too mad about my option. Oh that crunch. Big bite. Here we go. I started with the original. Excellent. Super tendy. Super tender. Juicy. Lots of flavor. Crispy skin. That's an excellent piece of chicken. The honey butter one is awesome. You've got a slight sweetness from the honey. Butter just makes everything better. It's also tender, juicy, everything. Very crispy too. I give that one an A plus as well. Last but not least, the extra spicy. I can just see all the seasoning and spices on there. Should I be nervous? I don't know. I don't know. We'll see. Oh I was just about to say I don't know if it's my palate or they didn't put a lot of seasoning on it because it's not that spicy but it takes a second for it to kick in. It's getting spicy. My fingers are coated in all of the heat. It's like not too spicy where you can't enjoy the flavor which is how we like it. We like to be able to actually enjoy the flavor. We get a little bit of a burn but holy crap that chicken is so dang juicy on the inside. It is like perfectly fried. It is delicious. I'd recommend eating very spicy and then switching to the honey butter one to get like that perfect like sweet spicy salty combination. So we visited Page before back in 2018 and did a bunch of the iconic things like Horseshoe Bend and Antelope Canyon but one stop that we did not visit that time or film really is the Glen Canyon Dam which is the second tallest concrete arch dam in the United States at 710 feet only shorter than the Hoover Dam at 700. Glen Canyon Power Plant produces 5 billion kilowatt hours of hydroelectric power annually which is distributed to Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, and Nebraska. Damn this dam is huge and we're back and we have one more stop that we want to make although now it's starting to rain again so I don't know if that's going to happen. We're trying to go to a spot called the Toadstool Hoodoos which was on our original plan so we were getting back on track. The sun was starting to come out and then we crossed into Utah and it's very dark and ominous looking so we have a little bit of daylight left like two and a half hours so I think we're gonna we're gonna try to wait it out and see if we can make it happen. Maybe it'll be fine when we get there, I don't know. All right we're hitting the trail. It's not sunny but at least it's not raining so that's a win in our book but the trail is only about 1.8 miles and it's pretty flat. It has rained recently as you can see in what we've said so it's pretty dang muddy. We haven't made it to the hoodoos yet but so far this trail reminds us so much of Badlands National Park. I think we made it. Cool. So the way the hoodoos are formed is a harder rock is sitting on top of softer sandstone and over time with water and wind the softer sandstone kind of erodes away leaving the boulder perched on top forming a hoodoo and it kind of looks like a cap on a mushroom. These hoodoos are super wild the rock that's on top of them making kind of the mushroom cap is just sitting on top and this one over here looks like it could just you could just push it off. You're gonna hear us say this probably a thousand times in all of our Utah videos but Utah just feels like you're at least southern Utah feels like you're just in a completely different planet at times. So the last 24 hours didn't go exactly how we drew it up but the plan B turned out pretty good and tasty we wouldn't have had that fried chicken if it all had gone smooth and it wouldn't have rained so I'm happy. I'm still thinking about the fries and fried chicken it was so good but the good news is the forecast looks like all sun for about a week or so and we have some really really amazing things planned in the next week. I took off some work we're just gonna be going hard here in Utah so things should be smooth sailing from here. Southern Utah is home to the some one day I need to put these like voiceover filmings like on the bloopers because it's like the worst angle of us. I usually leave the cap on.