Is it just me or is life more awesome when you’re constantly overcoming self induced adversity? We’ve been living in the same place for a year now so it seems like it’s time to cook up some potential future adventures. In this episode I fancy a road trip to all 47 state parks in the contiguous united states and lucky for me, a badass by the name of Dr. Randal S. Olson already mapped it out.

The Plan

As much as I would like to just jump in an RV and start driving, we aren’t financially, logistically or mentally prepared for such a thing so I’ll break this down into a few steps. Currently, we live in Scottsdale in a beautiful home. Both of my kids go to great schools and Z works at the school Maxine is going to. Oh… and we don’t have an RV.

Since most vacations are about a week long, it feels like a reasonable idea to plan to visit each park for about a week. Since there are 47 state parks in the contiguous United States, 47 weeks of planning gives us an awesome buffer for problems and visiting family and friends during our year trip. Traveling on the weekends works best for me as I work 9-5.

So what is the plan? This plan will break down how we prepare for this adventure that I feel like we need. This will also explain the optimistic idea of what we plan to achieve during the adventure but we all know that those plans tend to fly out the window during execution. I do recall ignorantly suggesting that the bicycle trip down the pacific coast highway must be flat because it follows the ocean. ^_^

Mentally

In order to make this happen I have to have the buy in from the other three humans that live with me. I’ll have to put together a solid book of awesomeness that explains why I would want to stuff 4 souls in a small caravan to drive 16,000 miles over the span of a year. Since 2 of the 3 humans in this equation are tiny and share some of my DNA, selling the adventure shouldn’t be hard. The hard sell will be convincing the love of my life that it will increase the quality of her life to tackle the biggest hurdles of caring for and educating our children on the road while also showing them these amazing places. Finally, I will have to transition back to working from home, or more importantly, being highly productive in the presence of chaos. I’ve grown accustomed to my lovely office away from home with a great view.

Fortunately, it won’t take a terrible amount of convincing for my wife because I married a badass that leans into adventure as much as I do. We hiked 14’ers in Colorado during our honeymoon and have moved half a dozen times since then seeking adventure. Suggesting that she needs to put together an itinerary that teaches our kids about each national park in the two days of travel between each park will definitely be the easy sell. She’ll probably create that itinerary before we even leave. The hard sell will be the other living adjustments like figuring out how to hit the gym every day and explaining how I will actually get work done in a small box of chaos or how we will all exist in a healthy manner in such a tiny box. I don’t have great arguments for those but I will support her fully along the way and she knows that my support can be super great if I’m fully committed to it. That may have to be a selling point. ^_^

Logistically

We live in a house so we would have to either sell the house or prepare it to be rented in order to move. We remodeled a year ago so the thought of renting it out hurts a little bit but it’s definitely something we can do. We would also have to downsize again. It seems that every few years we purge most of what we own and end up having to re-establish ourselves in a new house over a year or two. This is getting old so it would be advantageous to come up with a place to keep most of our major household items like beds, couches, that suit and printer I use once a year, etc. At this point it would not be a bad idea for us to save up and buy some property to build a facility on it that would allow us to park an RV and store the stuff that we keep having to buy every time we abandon our home for a while. The property would have to be somewhere we could enjoy it and not some random cheap lot in the middle of misery.

We need to acquire an RV and despite the fact that I feel like it is more of a financial move than a logistical one, we can’t begin the adventure without it so I’m including it here. The RV will have to be able to comfortably host two adults and two children. Since the goal is to enjoy every national park in the contiguous united states and not every national park offers RV camping, we’ll also have to be able to separate the camping vehicle, which will be an office during the day, and the daily adventure vehicle. Fortunately, we can plan on doing the trip in such a way that we should only need a 3 season vehicle to get the job done by staying out of the northern states in the winter.

At this moment in time, it looks like it may be most beneficial to acquire a large class C motorhome and a small towable car. We plan to relocate every week so this would give us the most comfortable means of travel with a bathroom, food and entertainment onboard while also offering a fuel efficient means of getting around the destinations we travel to.

TLDR Logistics

1. Buy an affordable piece of land w/no HOA or zoning and place a storage unit on it for all our stuff.
2. Prepare our home to be put on the market as a long term rental.
3. Acquire an RV & set it up.
4. Book the first few months of destinations.
5. Hand over our home to a property manager and forget it exists.
6. Begin the adventure.