LONG STORY SHORT By Jason Clark Anyone who has seen our route may notice that it looks a bit funky—it’s not the most efficient point-to-point trek across the country. It did start out that way, but several factors forced large and small adjustments over time. Here’s a look at the steps I took to build our route and which considerations led to the final version. ![]() Step 1: Determine a list of destinations From the beginning, our primary goal was clear: visit all of the national parks in the United States. We knew some would be out of our reach for this trip (those in remote Alaska, for example), but that still left us with 50+ national parks in the contiguous U.S. Besides the national parks, there were other places we were interested in as well:
Also, there were sporting events I was interested in. I wanted to:
Fortunately, these goals are fairly compatible. NPS sites are quite literally in every corner of the country, so any city with a baseball team would either be near an NPS site or on the way to one. And places like New York, Boston, and Washington, D.C., were on our list anyway. Step 2: Determine time needed at each destination This is where the hard work began. I have major travel FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out), so it was important to me that we have enough time in each park and city to fully experience it—as much as anyone can in a week or less. That meant researching each destination and finding out how much we would want to do there. I spent a lot of time on national park websites, AllTrails, city tourism websites, and “Top Ten Things to do in Blah Blah Blah” listicles to find out what was available. With all that in hand, these are the factors that helped determine how long our stays would be: For parks (national or otherwise)
For cities
After all this research, I had a full list of minimum stay lengths for every national park, plus some cities (I never got around to finishing those… whoops). Step 3: Determine seasonal restrictions This is a big one, and it's the main reason our route can seem nonsensical. Almost every park that gets snow will be disrupted by it, sometimes in a major way. For example, most of the roads in Yellowstone close each November and don’t reopen until May. To avoid FOMO in these places, we needed to be there when we could access the whole park. On the other hand, some places are extra special during certain times of year: Yosemite’s waterfalls are in full force in the spring, Utah’s parks look incredible (incroyable!) in the snow, and anywhere with great fall colors look, well, great in the fall. We also applied some common sense. We avoided Arizona in the summer and Oklahoma during peak tornado season. (Kristine's anxiety is relieved we will avoid the spinniest of winds.) And we figured that attending baseball games would be easiest during baseball season. Step 4: Fit it all together (repeat as needed) The number of times I repeated this step is almost comical. I used Google Calendar, creating each stay and driving day as its own event, then rearranging them as needed. I made so many different versions that the calendar names grew increasingly ridiculous: The Big Trip, The Bigger Big Trip, The Biggest Big Trip, The Big Trip for real, The Big Trip test, etc. Essentially, each version had the same three sections:
The West had to be completed in the summer or fall, and the South had to be avoided in the summer. The Northeast + Midwest had more flexibility, but both would be lovely in the fall and miserable in the winter. I also included a few rules in my route-building to give us the best shot at avoiding burnout and keeping our sanity during the trip:
Every version of the trip had these rules applied, and every version included the same three sections in some form. It's just that the arrangement of those sections—and the destinations and events within them—changed. Ultimately though, the route we settled on was a bit more complicated:
We'll see if we stick to it.
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