We Have A Plan!

I’m such a planner by nature, I love to have everything all planned out. So with summer coming to an end this weekend it only seems natural that I would get our next summer’s plans rolling. In my previous post about our EPIC National Park road trip (HERE) I shared the map I had bought off Amazon. Today I added all the National Parks to the map with sticky notes so I could see them all easily.

We then narrowed it down to the SW corner of the US, which coincidentally happens to be just about half of the 47 contiguous US National Parks.

Once I knew which parks we planned to visit I set to work on mapping out the best route possible. I again used sticky notes so I could rearrange the order of the parks as I played with routes on Google Maps. I ran into trouble with Google Maps limiting me to ten destinations, and we had 27! I ending up finding a work around on this handy website that made it possible to enter in 25 destinations (check it out HERE). I still had to delete two stops in order to get them all in, but it didn’t change the route.

Getting all the parks on one map made me happier than it probably should have. Here is our route, all 6,263 miles and 106 hours of driving. If you add in on from our house to my parents for 4th of July and back home at the end it is 6,748 miles.

When I first started dreaming of this trip I thought a whole summer would be plenty of time, I’m quickly figuring out that may not be the case! Next I’ll work on how many days to spend at each park, where to stay, and what to see. Let me know all the must see things along the way!