Deep Dive: Building Our Itinerary
How we came to decide where we'd go on our Big Trip.
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:
Other National Parks Service sites (national monuments, historic sites, battlefields, etc.)
State parks
Most big cities
Rivers known for good whitewater rafting
Also, there were sporting events I was interested in. I wanted to:
Attend a game at every major-league baseball stadium
See the Indianapolis 500
Play golf at notable courses
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)
Top day hikes (in terms of quantity and distance)
Available tours (mostly parks with cave tours, but also places like Mesa Verde National Park, where a tour is required to see the largest cliff dwellings)
Size of the park (some parks, like Yellowstone and Olympic, are so large that driving time needs to be considered)
For cities
Scheduled events (like an evening baseball game)
Museums or buildings of interest
Notable restaurants and breweries
Other time-filling stuff (like festivals, urban parks, etc.)
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:
West: from the Pacific coast to the Rockies
Northeast + Midwest: everywhere from the Dakotas to New England
South: self-explanatory
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:
Driving days are for just that—driving. We can make stops, but we won’t plan to do anything before or after a drive.
No more than eight hours of driving in a day. This is as much a safety rule as it is a time-management rule.
At least one “day off” each week, with no pressure to do anything in the park or city we were staying in. I figured we’d need time to catch our breath, and we could use these days off to run errands or make repairs on our rig.
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:
The West (July to November 2023): We’re starting with the region we’re most familiar with, visiting some places we’ve already seen as we learn to live on the road. This gives us some margin for rookie mistakes, including those costly enough to ruin a stay.
Winter break (November 2023 to February 2024): There are few places worth towing a trailer to in the dead of winter, and we wanted to spend the holidays with family. Yes, Super Bowl Sunday is a holiday.
The South (February to April 2024): We’re missing out on some ballparks by visiting before baseball season, but this is the most-thawed part of the country in early spring
Midwest and West again (April to August 2024): This is where our route really becomes messy. I wanted to see the Indy 500 (Indianapolis in May), and we moved some of our Colorado stops from 2023 to 2024 to attend to a wedding. So once we visit Philadelphia in April, we’ll turn back west and make stops until we hit the Rockies, then cut north and see the Dakotas and Great Lakes before ending up in New England by the end of summer.
Northeast and Appalachia (August to October 2024): Late-season baseball and fall colors. We’re doing a lot of extra driving to see this region at this time of year.
Return trip home (October to November 2024): We did save a bit for our drive back to Southern California, including a final stop at our favorite national park (for now), the Grand Canyon.
We'll see if we stick to it.