I am writing this on the first full day of a long-weekend vacation. We had originally planned on AM picking me up at about 3:30pm yesterday, but several things conspired against us to prevent that. Instead, we ended up leaving from home at 4pm. The route to Zion we took was the I-17N to Flagstaff, then Hwy. 89 north through page to Utah route 9. The drive didn't start out very promising, as I was listening to traffic on the radio. It turned out that there was some major accident on I-17 about 30 miles north of Phoenix that backed traffic up all the way to the loop 101. Traffic for that stretch of road was moving at an absolute crawl. Unfortunately, there really isn't a good alternate route up to Flagstaff, other than going through Payson (which is out of the way, and was dealing with an even larger backup because of a missed construction deadline). It actually took up 3 1/2 hours to get to Flagstaff, an hour longer than it has ever taken us before.
Based on the plan, we would have gotten some Subway for dinner in Flagstaff and eaten it on the way, then stopped in Kanab, UT, for some Russell's ice cream (they have the best wild huckleberry ice cream). We knew that the ice cream place in Kanab would be closed by the time we got through because we were running so late. Instead of the following the plan, we decided to stop and eat at Buster's in Flagstaff. It is a nice sit-down restaurant with some relatively good food. I had some clam chowder (way more potato than clam, but it tasted good) and some grilled shrimp. AM had a portabello burger and loved it.
After finishing dinner, we got onto Hwy. 89 at 8:30. We didn't get to Zion until 1am, or so we thought. Since Utah follows DST, it was actually 2am. Exhausted, we went the sleep immediately after checking in.