We've always been up for our next adventure: a fun date night, a big vacation or a road trip to explore a new place. I've loved road trips with Jacob, but we are learning to really love road trips with kids too!
It's amazing to go somewhere and have a romantic memory of two tied to it. It's also really fun to head back to some of our favorite places and share our Arizona road trips with the kids. We've learned to make sure our car is in order and all set for the adventure before it even starts. That always sets us up for a successful road trip with the kids.
If a road trip with kids (or without kids) is in your future, visit Firestone Complete Auto Care to get your car ready for road trip season – you can even schedule an appointment online.
With their 93 years of service experience, they can handle tune-ups, oil changes, brakes, wheel alignment, car batteries – you name it. They even have a Triple Promise that guarantees your experience will be fixed right, priced right, and right on time. It's the easiest way to set up an appointment and come out confident you can hit the road prepared.
Speaking of hitting the road, let's chat about some of our favorite road-trip-with-kids destinations.
For anyone looking for a desert-themed road trip with kids, I wanted to share the three places we highly recommend road tripping with your kids when you're in Arizona.
Road Trips with Kids from Phoenix
Sedona
Hello hiking and amazing food! The scenery is amazing – we're talking some of the prettiest red rock and forest mash-ups in the state. It's a place you can really explore nature and let kids run around a bit, too. Plus there are exciting jeep tours, fun nature tours, plenty of family-friendly food, and you can head one town over to Jerome for some ghost tours. Yes, those old-west towns claim to be haunted. This is one place that has embraced it and has ghost-themed diners and tours. You can go on a creepy tour if your kids are older, but there are family-friendly options too.
Sedona also boasts of many high-end dining and family-friendly food places. Plus, you really need to walk Main Street and try their famous fudge. As an added bonus, it's a place that goes to bed a little early so bedtime is never an issue!
Greer
We are suckers for the White Mountains, particularly since Jacob grew up there and can play tour guide to some really amazing locations. Whenever we want to beat the heat, we head up to Greer and grab a cabin rental for a night or two. It's the perfect climate in the summer and a place you can enjoy winter sports in the winter.
The Molly Butler Lodge in the cabins is delicious, and it's one place nature will wow you. This is the kind of road trip you'll want to plan for s'mores and card games. Many people book cabins without wi-fi or phone reception access just to completely disconnect. I kind of love when a family road trip can be that intentional. If you want a cabin retreat with plenty to do and see, Greer is your place!
Kid-Friendly Road Trip Ideas
Tucson/Tombstone
It never ceases to amaze me, when people come from out-of-state, how much the cactus variety wows them. Everyone seems to want a picture with giant saguaro cacti and it makes me stop to reflect how much I take these beautiful plants for granted. You can find these all over Arizona, but hiking in the Sabino Canyon may be the prettiest place to see them in their natural habitat. We're talking ultimate desert-scape in one of the most picturesque places.
Tucson is the smaller-feeling but still plenty-large city in Arizona that lends to family visits so well. There's the Biosphere if you want to do something interesting and quirky, plenty of museums and attractions, and local ice cream hotspots that will wow every age.
But while you're heading that way, I'd go a little further and stop in Tombstone too. This is the old west at its best. You can see high noon shootout reenactments, printing presses from the era, and plenty of interesting shops. The cemetery is one of the most interesting places with quirky descriptions and interesting details of wrongly accused criminals. It truly shows the wild west.
Kids and adults love road-tripping to Tombstone.
We're excited to add a few more family road trips this summer. And we're so grateful for easy tune-ups to make sure our car is as ready as we are!
