How I'm Planning Our National Parks Vacation Route
This August we are heading out west on our National Parks Vacation. The kids are so excited. I am so excited. Nick's so excited All God's children are so excited. You can be excited too because today I'm sharing on Planning our National Parks Vacation Route. And how you can plan a route for your next vacation too!
I mentioned this in my last post but we are sticking to an undisclosed budget for our vacation. We will be gone for 14 nights and will cover as much territory, have as much fun, and see as much as we can for as little of money as possible.
Is that even possible? Of course it is!
I wanted to share with you our rough map for where we will be going. What we will be doing. Places you can look for us to be at. Probably eating ice cream.
Here's our epic voyage of a plan:
Now this map has most of the places that we are going but I didn't list them all on the map. Just wanted to give you a general view of where we're going and how we're spending our time.
The first part of the vacation we'll be spending time up north in Badlands area. The end part of our vacation we'll be out west in the desert, and moving home. Sandwiched in the middle will be Yellowstone and Grand Teton.
I look at planning a vacation route kind of like playing with silly putty.
Some parts are really hard and other parts are those stringys that go everywhere. It's just a matter of malleability and trying to get it to work together okay. And getting those strings where you want them to go.
We put this together by starting to list (Nick and I) where we wanted to go out west. Can you even imagine if we started asking the kids all the places they want to go? Miles of lists, lol.
Of course there are lots of places that didn't make the cut as we started to come up with a plan and a loop that would work for our trip. I really wanted to go Glacier National Park but it was so far away.
I talked to friends.
If I knew you had gone to Yellowstone or Mount Rushmore, I was asking you questions. The two biggest helps were my in-laws, and my good friend Kathy. They were able to help me form in my mind what time frames I would need for places. Online places are just a dot on a map. It is always so helpful to hear from people who have been about what to do, where to go, pit stops, ice cream shops that are worth the $4 million to visit, etc.
My friend Kathy introduced me to Dinosaur National Park and we are so excited to go. I never would have known to go there if I hadn't talked to her.
I used google maps to list where we wanted to go so I could see them all mapped out.
That sentence ended with a preposition.
Forgive me. Didn't mean to do that right there.
Did it again.
Darn you, prepositions.
Anyway, Google Maps is a great way to see how our total trip looks all platted out and ready to go. You can map out up to 10 destinations and rearrange them which is handy as I am not one with the order.
After days of hard negotiations and talks, we decided to ditch Glacier and keep Arches. It was a hard decision. One of us may have cried a little. I coerced the kids to vote. They both voted against Glacier. Traitors. In the end we came up with our current route that you see above.
I try to keep driving time to under 8 hours a day.
I know our family's limit and 8 hours seems to be about it. When the kids were younger and napped all of the time we could stretch to 14 hours. It took copious amounts of movies and snacks but we could do it. Now Nick and I are old. The kids are bored. It's just not a good situation.
So I knew that driving to Yellowstone all in one fell swoop was not a good idea. Hence the epic voyage of stops and starts. Hence this post on Planning our National Parks Vacation Route. :)
I wanted to knock out states.
As you may or may not know, we are trying to get the kids to all 50 states. I am not sure if that is going to happen before they are out of school but that's our goal. Or we might just have to make sure they are both doctors and/or lawyers to keep them in school :). The jury is still out on our decision.
Anyway, I've heard rave reviews about Theodore Roosevelt National Park, but it is WAY up there.
However, we decided to go because if we didn't North Dakota would just be hanging out all by its lonesome as a state we need to visit. So we're going to North Dakota folks.
After I have the bulk of the route done I start figuring out where we're going.
Here is a rough itinerary for our vacation:
- Day #1: Wisconsin Dells, stopping in Minnesota
- Day #2: The Laura Ingalls Homestead
- Day #3: Badlands National Park
- Day #4: Mount Rushmore, Crazy Horse
- Day #5: Devil's Tower National Monument, Theodore Roosevelt National Park
- Day # 6: Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site, Billings, Montana
- Day #7: Little Bighorn National Battlefield, Heart Mountain Relocation Center, Yellowstone National Park
- Day #8: Yellowstone National Park
- Day #9: Grand Teton National Park
- Day #10: Yellowstone National Park
- Day #11: Arches National Park
- Day #12: Arches National Park, Dinosaur National Park
- Day #13: Dinosaur National Park
- Day #14: Rocky Mountain National Park
- Day #15: Omaha, Nebraska
From there I will see if I can fit in more details at each location or sites that are on the route along the way.
So there you have it, a step-by-step guide to Planning our vacation route!
Following these steps has always been helpful for me. I lay out all of the things our family wants to do on a vacation this way. I hope this helps you, too!
Happy vacation planning!