Dreading a Government Shutdown While in Oregon

LONG STORY SHORT
Congress's ineptitude forces us to figure out some backup plans.

By Kristine McGowan

During our time in Bend, Ore., we devoured baked goods and every news article we could find about the looming government shutdown. The baked goods tasted better.

We did a lot of planning before we hit the road. We mapped out our route. We selected our rig after extensive research into trucks and travel trailers. And we made sure we had enough savings to cover not only 18 months of life on the road but also several months of life after the road, when we’ll search for jobs and a new home (without wheels).
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Despite all that, there was something we didn’t plan for: Congress’s inability to negotiate a spending bill that would keep the U.S. government open.

Silly us. How did we not see that coming?

In any other year, a government shutdown wouldn’t impact our lives much. Not even during my time at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which enjoys the complicated position of being funded by federal dollars but managed by a private institution, and therefore can keep employees working—to an extent—during a government shutdown.

But in 2023? Well. A shutdown threatened pretty much all our plans.

If you follow politics, you know the headaches a shutdown can bring, particularly when it comes to our national parks. Previous shutdowns have either shuttered the parks, costing surrounding communities hundreds of millions of dollars in lost visitor revenue, or left them open but largely unsupervised, resulting in extensive damage to our public lands.

Both approaches were terrible. Both were a testament to the embarrassing state of our country’s political discourse. And days before government funding was set to expire in 2023, the Department of the Interior announced what it would do if a shutdown occurred: close the parks.

Which meant we needed a backup plan.

We weren’t just visiting national parks, after all. We were living in them.

It was the end of September. We’d just made our way through Washington and Idaho, and we’d stopped in Bend, Ore., to spend the last few days of the month in one of our favorite mountain towns.

We looked at our upcoming schedule—and our stomachs hurt.

If the government shut down, we were looking at skipping some of our favorite spots in California: Redwoods, Lassen, Sequoia, Kings Canyon. To top it off, we would lose our five-day campground reservation in Yosemite.

If you’ve ever tried to get a campsite in Yosemite, you know how gutting this would be.

But we couldn’t do anything about it. Unless Congress got its act together, we’d have to go somewhere else.

That’s when we found a bit of luck in our travel schedule: Utah.

In previous shutdowns, Utah’s state legislature funded the state’s national parks to keep them open—and this time around, it planned to do the same. Most campgrounds in Utah’s parks were also operating on a first-come, first-serve basis by then, meaning campers didn’t need to reserve campsites in advance.

We were planning to head to Utah in November anyway. If the government shut down, we figured we could bump it up in our schedule and head there a little early. And if the government reopened while we were there, we could loop back to California afterwards to visit the spots we’d missed (although we’d have to accept that our Yosemite reservation couldn’t be salvaged).

Fortunately, none of that turned out to be necessary: Congress did get its act together and passed a spending bill just in time to avert a shutdown. But this enraging rollercoaster packed with loud-mouthed politicians taught us a heavy lesson by the time the ride ended.

No matter how much planning we do, we can’t control everything. Bad weather, accidents, illness—and, it turns out, inept legislators—can all derail our plans. Which means we have to be flexible and ready to think on our feet with little notice.

We’ll especially have to keep this in mind in 2024. We’re doing a lot more traveling this year, and it looks like Congress hasn’t given up their budgetary shenanigans. For all we know, another government shutdown could be breathing down our necks in the coming months.
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We’re not out of the woods yet. But if Congress’s incompetence tries to kick us out of these woods again, we’ll do our best to be ready.