Our Final Western Route—and Why We Changed It

​LONG STORY SHORT
Burnout, road damage, and flooding lead us to change our route a few times.

By Kristine McGowan

As much as we’d like to believe our trip will go according to plan, we can’t control everything. Bad weather, illness, family emergencies—anything can upend a planned trip. And when you’re traveling around the country for 18 months straight, you open yourself up to endless opportunities for derailment.
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We came up against that reality on the first leg of our trip, what we’ve otherwise been calling our “western route.” Here’s the route Jason originally planned for this leg:

And here’s the route we ended up driving:

Our final western route. (Visit "Our Route" under "The Big Trip" tab to see the corresponding stop for each numbered icon.)

Okay, so they don’t look that different.

Still, with a closer look, you can see that we skipped a few stops and added a few others. I’ve listed each of those stops below, along with the reason why we decided to skip them or add them to our route.
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Note: This list doesn’t account for all differences between the maps above. In the first map, some icons represent two destinations (e.g., #2 represents Monterey, Calif., and Pfeiffer Big Sur State Park), while in the second map, each icon represents just one destination.

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Placed We Skipped

All numbers in the headings below correspond to icons in the first map above.

Portland, Ore. (21)
We love Portland, so much that we spent a week here in May 2023 while purchasing our trailer. The couple who sold us their used Outdoors RV Timber Ridge 22FQS lived in Vancouver, Wash., just across the river, so it made sense to stay in one of our favorite cities while we smoothed out the sale’s final details. In turn, it made sense to remove Portland from our route later in the year, because we’d already visited recently.

Crater Lake National Park, Ore. (23)

Crater Lake is certainly worth a stop—if, unlike us, you have the energy to get there.

No. 23 in the first map represents two destinations: Bend, Ore., and Crater Lake National Park. We’d planned to park our trailer in Bend and spend one day visiting Crater Lake, about two hours away. It seemed like a good idea—until we got to Bend and found ourselves still grappling with the burnout we’d picked up in Canada.

Then we realized we’d arrived too late in the season to do the one thing we wanted to do in Crater Lake: take a boat to Wizard Island. Between that, our burnout, and the knowledge that we’d already visited this park in 2022, we couldn’t bring ourselves to make the drive. Instead, we took a much-needed rest day.

Kings Canyon National Park, Calif. (28)

The trees of Sequoia offered some consolation after we decided to skip Kings Canyon.

Fate seemed determined to keep us out of Kings Canyon National Park. For one, major storms had damaged the roads in January 2023 and closed much of the park for the rest of the year. For another, we’d planned to camp here while visiting both Kings Canyon and Sequoia—the parks are so close they share a border—but weeks prior, we got an email from the park saying that our campground reservation was canceled. The campground needed to close unexpectedly “for administration.” Whatever that means.

Jason scrambled to find us another campground nearby, but in the end, we decided to spend just one day in Sequoia and skip Kings Canyon altogether. We’ve visited Sequoia often enough that we didn’t need much time there. As for Kings Canyon, the portions of the park we hadn’t seen before weren’t accessible. We decided to move on.

Vermillion Cliffs National Monument, Ariz. (30)
Stop No. 30 on our map includes three destinations: Kanab, Utah; the North Rim of Grand Canyon National Park; and Vermillion Cliffs National Monument. We managed to hit the first two, but after that, our luck ran out.

Like most visitors to Vermillion Cliffs, we wanted to hike The Wave, a spot so popular you have to win a permit via the park’s lottery system to see it. We’d lost out on the advanced lottery, so every day leading up to stop No. 30, Jason entered us in the daily lottery. And we lost every time.

We’ll be back in the area in 2024, so we’ll try our luck again then. Fingers crossed.

Death Valley National Park, Calif. (35)
Hurricane Hilary may not have hit Southern California as hard as expected, but Death Valley sure took a beating. Storm-induced flooding damaged all park roads, and many were still closed by the time we expected to visit. We could have managed to get in, but we headed home instead because Jason’s brother had just finished paramedic school, and we wanted to be at his graduation ceremony. More than anything, we skipped Death Valley to be with family.

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Placed We Added

ll numbers in the headings below correspond to icons in the second map above.

Sacramento, Calif. (7)

Yay, trains!

Early on after hitting the road, we did something that feels pretty abnormal for us now: We spent a week camped in one spot.

That’s primarily because we had several destinations to visit in the San Francisco Bay Area, and nearby campsites were rather limited. So we parked the trailer in one spot and ventured out for day trips from there. With all the time we saved on moving between campsites, we could explore more than we expected—and after Jason heard about the California Sate Railroad Museum in Sacramento, we knew where we would spend the extra time.
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Long story short: I like trains, so we went to Sacramento to look at trains.

San Juan Islands, Wash. (22)

We will never regret spending our fifth anniversary here.

Of all the destinations we added to our route at the last minute, the San Juan Islands are probably our favorite. One of our good friends in the Seattle area recommended it to us, so when we were looking for something special to do on our anniversary, we already had this place in mind.

“Special” doesn’t even scratch the surface. I could ramble on and on about this place, but instead I’ll just say this: kayaking and orcas.

Craters of the Moon National Monument & Preserve, Idaho (27)

Look how cool this place is. Can you believe we almost missed it?

Craters of the Moon National Monument & Preserve, a large volcanic area that may become a national park someday, had been on our radar for a while. But it’s long drive from pretty much anywhere, and initially we didn’t think we’d venture close enough to warrant the drive. Then we reworked the Idaho portion of our trip, and it became clear that we could hit Craters of the Moon on our way to Boise from the Sawtooths. We jumped at the chance.
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We only got in a short hike, but this national monument was well worth the detour. And thank goodness for all the RV parking. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have been able to even consider stopping here.

St. George, Utah (35)

The 300-yard, par-four thirteenth hole at Sand Hollow Golf Resort. Jason hit the 3-wood of his life here, to six feet, and promptly missed the eagle putt. And to think, it wouldn’t have happened if we didn’t stop here.

We ended up adding St. George, Utah, to our route due to a camping snafu: We looked into campsite reservations at Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada a little too late, and we snagged just one night there instead of our desired two. Which meant we had to find somewhere else to camp on the second night.

St. George was the most logical option, given that after Valley of Fire, we’d planned to visit the Kolob Canyons area of Zion National Park next. We may have missed out on multiple nights in Valley of Fire, but Jason squeezed in a round of golf in St. George, so we weren’t too upset about it.

Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park, Utah (36)

Sand everywhere. But we ain’t mad about it.

As with Craters of the Moon, we stopped at Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park on our way to somewhere else—and again, it was well worth the detour. We got to watch dune buggies and run around on sand dunes like kids for an hour. By the time we got back to the truck, we were grinning like idiots.