I bet we could do this full time....

The spark that lights a fire

    “I bet we could do this full time...” I made this comment to Katie as we were finishing up what we called our trip of a lifetime. She had just graduated from dental hygiene school, which was quite intense - basically a full time job with very little time off for vacations. She wanted to go out west and visit some of the national parks, as she had done with her grandparents when she was a kid. 

 

    But how were we going to make that happen? I like hiking/backpacking and back country camping, but that’s not her cup of tea. Did I mention we have 4 children within 5 years of each other? In the summer of 2019 their ages were 10, 9, 7 and 5. Two girls, two boys. I think since we started having kids we have gone camping MAYBE a total of three weekends. So tent camping wasn’t really something we wanted to do for a month either. So we did what any rational human being would do... 

 

    Well I should clarify something. We don’t really fall into the category of “rational human beings.” Our philosophy for the last 5 years or so has been if you want to do something, go do it now, because you never know what tomorrow will bring. That doesn’t sound too irrational, but we take it pretty extreme. Like in 2015, when we decided to move from our house in Michigan, where we had both lived our entire lives (36 and 33 years), and almost all of our family still lived. Instead of moving across town like most people would, we packed up everything we had into a 28 foot Penske truck and drove it overnight to a rental home we found in North Carolina, 750 miles away from anybody we knew. Or in 2017, when I hadn’t done a serious trail run, like ever, but grabbed the chance to run the Barkley Fall Classic, probably the hardest 50k in the US, because I had seen a documentary on Netflix. Or that time that Katie decided she wanted to be a dental hygienist after having 4 kids so she balanced being a wife and mom with being a student doing class work and clinic hours equivalent to a full time job (if not more). 

 

    So that’s where we were in the spring of 2019. We quickly determined that we would need some type of camper, but we were on a pretty limited budget knowing we would also have big expenses for the trip. One rule we have is never pay full price for anything, we are always looking for a bargain. We ended up finding a 1995 Starcraft pop up camper that needed some love. We redid the floors and repainted a bunch, but the bones of the camper were still in good shape. We did a few upgrades to our Honda Odyssey minivan so it could tow and we were ready to go.

 

The Trip of a Lifetime

    So with little to no experience camping, never having owned or used a camper, and also never having towed anything behind a vehicle, we loaded up and decided we were going to hit every park or monument or tourist trap possible in 3 weeks time (plus 1 week visiting family in Michigan). We were going to do Badlands, Devils Tower, Yellowstone, Glacier, Grand Tetons, Bryce and Zion Canyon, Arches, Canyonlands, Grand Canyon.... OK hold on, that’s too much even for us. We quickly realized if we tried to do all of that, we would be spending maybe 1 day at each place before we packed up to drive to the next place. We decided to cut out everything in the Southwest and instead focus on two places - Black Hills, SD and Yellowstone. The rest would have to wait for another trip. 

 

    But we still saw and did so many incredible things in just those two places. Badlands Natl Park was breathtaking. We stayed a week in Black Hills which is surrounded by several tourist spots - Mount Rushmore, Deadwood, Custer State Park and more. We then spent a full week at Yellowstone seeing all of the wildlife and unique geo-thermal features that all seem to be constantly changing. You could spend a month there and not see everything. We then spent a full week driving home because we were exhausted and didn't want to drive more than 5-6 hours per day (it was 2,100 miles to get back). It was during this drive home that I made the statement in the beginning. Check out some of the pictures down below - who wouldn't want to do and see stuff like that every day? That gave us the idea, even though at the time we said there was no way we could do it because neither one of us were teachers, and there was zero chance we were going to try to home-school our kids.

    Enter Coronavirus....

Badlands National Park

Running at Badlands (Carey running around places will be a common theme)

Buffalo herd at Custer State Park

Hike/run through the beautiful trails in Custer

Devils Tower

Grand Prismatic Basin in Yellowstone National Park

Old Faithful 

Another Carey run up Mt Washburn in Yellowstone - snow in July above 10,000 feet!

Quick stop for - you guessed it - Carey getting another epic view of the Grand Tetons

On the way home we drove through Red Rocks Amphitheater with our camper when the Avett Brothers were having a concert - oops! It was crazy busy but we still got parked and hiked the trails and could hear them playing.