Mrs M and I have embarked on our grand adventure.
We intend, God willing, to complete our quest to visit all 63 US National Parks. Get the passport stamp. See the sights. Take the pictures.
This is not a simple quest. It will take us to Alaska, Maine, Florida, California, American Samoa and many points in between. We will see the biggest hole in the ground. The biggest mountain in the US. Stalagmites. Wildlife. The tallest trees. Smoky Mountains. Smoky fumaroles. Water that shoots out of the ground. Lava that shoots out of the ground.
We want to see it all. To do that, we have to get there. So here are the rules of the road, 2026 version. We’ll see if more travel causes any necessary adjustments.
We just returned from our first “official,” dedicated National Park trip. With this trip, we have now visited – with the passport stamps to verify – 12x of the 63x National Parks. These rules will govern our next few years of adventure as we visit 51x more:
- Figure Out How To Pack. Mrs M and I have profoundly different philosophies about packing. If you know us, you know that this applies to most things that we can disagree about. But it does apply specifically to packing, and you need a trip or 2 to figure out what you want to do. 1 suitcase? 2? Travel with a cooler? Travel light? Heavy? Very heavy? You have to find your happy place. And then the pack mule will have to carry it (ask me how I know).
- Minimize Bags of Stuff. We travel very heavy. A minimum of 3 suitcases into the hotel every night. My camera backpack. Her pillow. The cooler. And … all of her bags. Her standard on the last trip was 3 bags of food, water bottles, and who knows what else. Drives me nuts. Bags do not transport well. They get lost in the car. They fall off of luggage carts (ask me how I know). I believe in rolling suitcases and plastic storage containers in the car. I do not believe in, trust, or accept bags.
- Beware The Cooler Trap. We travel with ice in a cooler. That means that we travel with water in a cooler. Last trip, we decided we needed two coolers, and one was an old Igloo 6-pack with a rotating lid. It fell off the luggage cart: I swear it was lodged firmly in place between 2 suitcases. It wasn’t. Water & ice was all over the hotel lobby.
- (ed. note) Be kind to all people you meet on the trip. You never know when strangers will have to clean up your mess.
- Trip Planning Is An Art. And you may want to use a map. Planning this trip … I didn’t know that Carlsbad Cavern & Guadalupe Mountains National Parks were within an easy hour’s drive of each other. When I finally discovered this nugget, I adjusted hotels so we could stay in one hotel for 3 nights … arriving after driving on night 1, going to Guadalupe on day 2, and then visiting the Cavern on day 3. Not changing hotels for a day or 3 is a luxury; don’t miss your chances.
- Don’t Eat Chinese Food In Omaha. Simply, you are on the road and don’t know where all of the best restaurants are. Eat like a native, or eat like a veteran of franchised food. Don’t eat food that you don’t know why it’s there. You may regret it (ask us how we know).
- (ed. note) Don’t eat Chinese food in Phoenix, either.
- (ed. note 2) Don’t eat Mexican food in Lompoc … unless they are pork belly tacos masquerading as bar food. They were scrumptious.
- Don’t Trust Strangers To Know Your Palate. Because they don’t. What some hotel clerk thinks is a GREAT restaurant may not match your wife’s discerning taste buds. And yes, you can ask me how I know.
- Comfort Has A Cost. The Alternative Is Worse. We have stayed in hotels of every grade. We don’t like really expensive hotels when you come back to the hotel dirty & dusty from the hike. We don’t like really cheap motels. Finding that middle ground … tricky. Very few hotels reliably have 2 comfortable chairs in a room. Most have zero. Comfort has a cost … and is seldom reliably obtained. Unfortunately.
- (ed. note) Drury Hotels are our current fave. IYKYK.
- “Free” Breakfasts Are Not Free. There is no free breakfast: you pay for it. I admit it: we often stay at hotels with a “free” breakfast such as Holiday Inn Express or Best Western Inns. We find them affordable, dependable and, uh, reasonable for us. Usually. But their breakfasts really are sometimes not great and do not work for me 3 days in a row. The worst are the dreaded plastic cheese omelettes at HIE that require a muffin, hot sauce, and some sausage to make them at all edible. Assuming the muffin, hot sauce and sausage are edible.
- Crowd Sourcing Restaurants Can Work. Mrs M researches restaurants exhaustively before we hit town. We often try to have 1 good meal a day, and research usually works fine. But. Crowd sourcing information is only as good as the crowd. We have found that some restaurants – especially Mexican food, it seems – just are not rated according to our, uh, view of what is good Mexican food.
- (ed. note) Mrs M grew up eating the best tacos in Belleville, IL. Draw from that what you will.
- (ed. note 2) I grew up thinking food came in 2 varieties: truck stop and home cooking. Draw from that what you will.
- Embrace the Technology in Your Car. Honest. We bought a Subaru Ascent as our official Senior Citizen Touring Car, and have visited 5x National Parks in it so far. 12k miles on it. Works great. A feature I did not trust at first is cruise control, coupled with a sensor that automatically slows your car when a slower car is sensed ahead of you in your lane. I am getting used to this … and if you don’t pay attention, your car slows and you’re suddenly going 55 in a 70. But the feature does actually help you navigate highway traffic very effectively.
- (ed. note) Self driving tech is not always my favorite, though. When the car tries to yank you back into your lane, I am not a fan. That feature is turned off. I will steer, thank you.
- Embrace AI in Travel Planning. We are still playing with different options … and computers and their algorithms are not always your friend. But, if you tell your favorite AI what you are trying to do on your trip, it can help you narrow the field of choices before you commit to anything. Mrs M found an app called WanderLog, and it is our current planning buddy.
- Listen To Those Around You. Last trip, we were eating dinner after a long day driving 660 miles. Day 1. A nearby couple talked about their day. On quest to drive Rt 66 from start to finish, they had driven just 47-1/2 miles in their day. Who do you think had more fun that day?
- (ed. note) We adjusted our itinerary to have more shorter days. It’s like the road to Hanna, which we did on our last trip to Maui … it’s about the journey, not the destination.
- Go See The Bats. We went to Carlsbad Caverns, and Mrs M SO wanted to return to the Park and see the bats fly out of the cave at dusk. Alas, it turned cloudy & wet, so the bats took a night off. I never would have chosen a bat expedition, but I was smart enough to tell the Lady, “Yes, dear.” We have to go back. Or find another bat cave.
