Travel | 3.27.2022

This Road Trip is Going to be Crazy

10 States

9 National Parks/Forests

2 Months Long

My friend and I are going to have a LOT of fun!

Here’s a quick and dirty all the places we hope to hit (in mostly the order we are taking)

Arizona

• Petrified Forest National Monument
• Grand Canyon
• South Rim
• North Rim
• Horseshoe Bend

Utah (Part One)

• Zion
• Las Vegas

California

• Joshua Tree National Forest
• Sequoia National Park
• Yosemite National Park (Ok, but every time I type “national park” I want to write it in Chinese, because that happens to be one of the words I know) (It’s 国家公园 [guójiāgōngyuán] in case anyone is curious)
• San Francisco
• Up the California/Oregon coast via Highway One
• Redwood National Park

Oregon

• Newport, OR
• Silver Falls State Park
• Portland

Washington

• Seattle
• Olympic National Park
• North Cascades National Park

Idaho

• Coeur d'Alene, ID

Wyoming

• Yellowstone National Park

Utah (Part Two)

• Logan, UT
• Salt Lake City
• Moab
• Arches National Park

Colorado (maybe)

• Mesa Verde
• Durango

New Mexico

• Shiprock rock formation (Near Shiprock, NM)

Now you can see why this is a two month long road trip...

How did this crazy road trip come to pass, you ask?

I’m a little... insane when it comes to planning trips.

The friend I’m going with mentioned she would have a few months between quitting her job and starting school again to get her doctorate. She has also never been to Oregon, and I simply cannot let that stand.

She said she had a few months and I took that to heart, planning a trip that would take a few months to do.

So I wrote up this crazy plan and sent it to her and she responded just as eagerly back and before I knew it, we are booking our stays!

Thankfully, she is just as excited about it as I am—maybe even more so, as she hasn’t seen 99% of the trip, while I haven’t seen probably 20%.

For two people who don’t love to drive, this might seem like an interesting choice of trip

We might not like to drive, but we both love road trips.

And this is one of the reasons we have it so spread out—our goal is to drive a max of 6 hours (preferably less) a day, and want to take rest days in between all the fun!

Another thing that makes this trip even better...

This trip is going to be “booked as we go”, as in, we will be booking our places to stay about two stops before. We just booked our stays for our Arizona and Utah Part One section of the trip (and I cannot even begin to tell you how excited I am!! Eeep!). Once we get to our Utah Part One stay, we will be booking the next couple.

This way, we have the flexibility to spend three weeks someplace instead of three days if we find that we simply cannot leave the place (looking at you Oregon)—or if we get someplace and realize we don’t need as much time as we budgeted, then we can move on to the next exciting thing!