The Road Trip

What:

Because I am the planner in our relationship, I had set myself with the task of laying out our National Park road trip for this upcoming summer. I evaluated potential routes with the following considerations in mind: route efficiency (point A to point B to minimize length and maximize interest along the way); distance between stops (Vitali gets grumpy driving long distances); time spent at each park (enough time to see all the sights as well as relax); and making sure we were visiting parks at the right time of the year (so we didn’t freeze or roast). That’s why it took four iterations…

Starting in Denver and finishing in Pennsylvania, ~11,000 miles, ~75 NPS sites, over five months.

Why:

We love camping for all of the joys sleeping out of doors brings: waking up in beautiful places, allowing your circadian rhythm to align with the Earth, eating really delicious food cooked over an open fire, and fantasizing about taking a hot bath while listening to the flap flap flap of your rainfly in tropical storm force winds.

We love hiking too! Nothing better than some good ol' Type II fun.

We are also National Park geeks – we own the Collector’s Edition of the National Park Passport which is a spiral bound book that has entries for almost all of the NPS sites – each with a handy spot for a cancellation stamp (which is unique to each park and Visitor Center, and shows the date you visited), as well as a spot for a sticker. I am a completionist so filling this up really tickles me.

We knew we wanted to camp inside the parks as much as possible which meant jockeying for backcountry permits and highly sought-after campsites – most are released six months ahead of time to the day – which means you have to set up and be ready to click your mouse at 8:00 AM MST to even attempt to book a campsite. We were successful most of the time, with campsites booked up within 30 seconds. A few places were even more competitive – Yosemite booked up less than a second after release, with us only being able to secure three different campsites on non-consecutive nights. I think more people trying and less campgrounds being open due to the pandemic were contributing factors, on top of it already being competitive.

We did also intersperse a few days of Airbnb’s and hotel rooms to avoid irreversible psychological damage.

How:

To touch on some of the gear we crammed inside Numa – who is crying softly BTW.

• An ultra luxury Coleman 6-person Instant Cabin which erects in less than a minute and allows us both to STAND inside! This would essentially be our home so it needed to have some comforts. I am happy to report we endured what seemed to be at least 50+mph gusts and this thing was fine.

• Double-high inflatable twin air mattresses because when you are camping for five months you want to have some level of basic comfort. Having someplace to sit inside the tent is amazing too.

• My Marmot 0 degree down sleeping bag, and Vitali’s REI 15 degree synthetic bag, both with silk liners. My bag is hands down incredible-- I’ve slept in it down to the low teens and was comfortable.

• 5 gallon water reservoir and 1 gallon gasoline

• 50 liter packs, a two-person backpacking tent, Klymit Static V sleeping pads (bomb), and ultralight chairs.

• Fishing Gear and Metal Detector

• Sony Alpha a7Riii with Tamron 28-75 and 70-180 f/2.8 lenses, tripod, goPro

• Some books to read, a deck of cards, Nintendo Switch, laptops

• Solar powered battery bank (which already fell off the of roof of our moving vehicle...), DC converter

• Backpacking stove with cooking instruments

• 3L water bladders and 6L reservoirs

• Backpacker’s Cache for bear country

• Food, toiletries, KN95s, miscellaneous camping gear

• Hiking boots, clothing to support the expedition

Laid out on the ground the amount of stuff seems shocking – especially after seeing it fit inside Numa! Although we’ve seen a bunch of people already with their cars stuffed to the brim… but they are all SUVs or vans!

We have a pretty great system nailed down after two parks. Bottom layer of items stay inside the car and top layer is essentially camp. Numa is riding low...