We're going to be there in July, staying with family. Outdoors is going to be at least 110 degrees in Phoenix, so we might travel up into Northern AZ, and road trips out of the state are possible. We really enjoy museums, and indoor activities are more appealing during the summer.
We've all been to the Grand Canyon, and would love to see it again, but not during the combination of summer heat and massive numbers of people during high season.
The Mob Museum in Las Vegas is not to be missed. Give yourself a few hours. There is also the Atomic Museum and the Punk Rock Museum.
There is a Meow Wolf in Las Vegas and one of the separate attractions is Omega Mart. It's different. There is an additional tour that is sort of an escape room style mystery to investigate. Or just walk around and see the weird stuff.
Hoover Dam is open again and you can even drive over it again. The drive up from Phoenix is actually very pretty, and with the altitude tolerable during the day.
Neon Museum, do the tour, it explains where they all came from. The best time we ever had was LasVegas Rock Crawlers. You get a Jeep that hauls 4 people and they guide you through some amazing scenery and you are driving. They have an easy route and a hard route, here's my video of doing the hard route Las Vegas Rock Crawlers
Anyone using this thread for recommendations could also get some useful information about Las Vegas from this GRM forum discussion.
Taliesin West if you are a Frank Lloyd Wright fan https://franklloydwright.org/taliesin-west/
If you're interested, there is a Minuteman silo available to tour in Tucson https://titanmissilemuseum.org/ It was pretty cool, I enjoyed it when we went a few years ago.
Painted Desert is pretty good too!
I wouldn't be scared of the weather in Flagstaff during the summer - Sedona will be warm but alot nicer than Phoenix. Jerome is kinda touristy and will be 80s/90s during the summer but is a cool place to check out if you like old mining towns.
I live in Flagstaff but am kinda lame and haven't done alot of museum stuff except for the Riordan Mansion. Most of my time is spent outdoors during the summer mountain biking, hiking, or fixing cars/the house.
If you go to Flagstaff there's an observatory there. They used to do tours at night where you could look through some of the older telescopes. I'm not sure if they still do the night tours, but here's a link.
https://lowell.edu/visit/experiences/general-admission/
Off US 89 North of Flagstaff there's Wupatki National Monument which has Anasazi dwellings. Here's a link.
https://www.nps.gov/wupa/index.htm
Or East of Flagstaff off I-40 there's Walnut Canyon National Monument which also has Anasazi dwellings. Here's a link.
https://www.nps.gov/waca/index.htm
Also, closer to Sedona there's Slide Rock State Park - where you can get in the river and go down the "slides" that have been eroded into the rocks. Here's a link.
https://azstateparks.com/slide-rock
That's all I got off the top of my head. It's been 20 years since I was out that way, need to make it back again one day.
Flagstaff: Museum of Northern Arizona is excellent. Lots to see and do around Prescott, too - good restaurants, whiskey row, several good museums, nice roads through the pines, especially over Mingus Mountain through Jerome to Sedona. Beautiful scenery on Schnebly Hill Road out of Sedona, you probably want high clearance today, but back in the early 1960s a sports car hillclimb ran this road! We used t use it on brisk TSD rallies back in the mid-1970s. Traffic in Oak Creek Canyon around Slide Rock and West Fork can be crazy in the summer these days, back in the '70's there was almost no traffic. I went to college in Flagstaff, got my Masters in 1971.
Wonderful replies. I was born in Arizona, but left by my first birthday, grew up in Florida. I have spent only a few weeks there as an adult.
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