Well, our total mileage turned out to be 10,107 (you can click here to pull up an interactive map of our route). To find out who won, you'll need to keep reading to the very end of this final post...
Nick's Top 3 Places:
1. Dinosaur National Monument (CO) - 2 parks in one, undiscovered, Grand Canyon-quality views & scale.
2. Bonneville Salt Flats (UT) - unique landscape, like a different planet, and drive as fast as you want.
3. Wisconsin Dells (WI) - Las Vegas for waterparks.
Sharon's Top 3 Places:
1. Devil’s Tower National Monument (WY) - an incredible natural wonder everyone should see.
2. Olympic National Park (WA) - had both a vast rocky Pacific coastline and a humid jungle-like rainforest.
3. Glacier National Park (MT) - snow-capped mountains and clear rivers to swim in, perfect temperature; Going-to-the-Sun road is a drive everyone must take.
Our Favorite State:
Wyoming - barely populated and packed with breathtaking natural and diverse beauty.
Our "Avoid" List:
Cuyahoga Valley National Park - disappointing, small, poorly maintained, and not national park-worthy.
Lessons Learned:
1. Scale back your plans. The country is huge. We thought we'd be coasting along after we decided to cut out Alaska from the itinerary... now we can only laugh that we ever considered the absurdity of squeezing it in. We were still skipping and cutting short attractions and sights left and right to stay on schedule. Sure, you can drive across America in the time we had, but you'll be very stressed. Many of the places we saw deserved weeks, not hours or days. The positive spin on this is that we have many places to come back to some day!
2. Living in a (small) camper gets old quick. Although there's the convenience of bringing your "home" with you wherever you go, pulling it with you is a pain. I like to explore back roads, go up steep and winding trails, and make those sudden U-turns when you pass something you want to turn around to take a closer look at. That's hard with a camper. And actually, considering the hit you take in gas mileage, the money it costs you to buy, maintain, and repair a camper, and the considerable fees RV parks charge near popular areas, I'm pretty sure staying in hotel rooms is actually cheaper when you add it all up.
3. Planning vs. winging it. With a few exceptions, we planned each day the night before. The good news is, this saves you on up-front planning, lets you change your mind without losing deposits, and it gives you maximum flexibility to adapt your trip to what you want as you want it. Campgrounds at state and national parks are usually first come, first serve, and most private RV parks also had plenty of sites available for late arrivals. The bad news is you experience the stress of not knowing where you'll spend the night until the afternoon and you have less time to research the areas you are passing through. For a long trip like this, I think winging it was the right decision. For a shorter one or two week trip, I would plan each day.
4. Overload. Seeing amazing things every day is great, but when you're doing it for two months straight it deprives you of the chance to process each of them individually. Right now it's a big long blur. It was also exhausting. You'd think with two months you'd find time to relax and feel like you're on vacation, but there was no buffer time between one sight or activity and the next. (I know, I know, poor us...)
5. Get off the beaten path. So many incredible sights caught us by surprise. Everybody knows the Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Yellowstone... but there are countless parks and monuments we hadn't even heard of that turned out to be just as incredible. Pay attention to those brown "attraction" signs on the highway, you never know what they might lead to.
Parting thoughts...
We originally wanted to do this trip for a couple reasons. For starters, there was something alluring about driving cross-country and seeing a big chunk of America in one go. Now we realize the country is too big to pull this off effectively; We're glad to have checked off the cross-country drive from our list, but our future trips will be focused on small, individual areas of the country.
Then there's the fact that we had the opportunity to do this now, and the next opportunity may not come until we're much older. Personally, I think the country is in bad shape right now and getting worse. For years, American traditions, values, and freedoms have been eroding. Obama is accelerating this in every way, but it started before him and no end is in sight. Debt, terrorism, government tyranny, moral decay... where will it lead? Although I still hope these trends can be reversed, we wanted to experience America now, while it's still great and recognizable.
Which brings me to a final note, on why we kept this blog. Basically, we just wanted to inspire you do what we're doing: go out and explore America, whether it's just one weekend at a time or for a whole two months as we were lucky enough to do. We've got an amazing country; go see it!
God Bless America.
P.S. Congratulations, Jon P., your guess of 10,001 miles makes you the winner of the cool Utah bison pocket knife.
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