From April through December 2021, we travelled over 12,000 miles, visited 17 states, 19 National Parks (14 of which we had never been to before), 19 other National Park units, 33 state parks, and several BLM lands, public gardens, and city and county parks.

Full disclosure here: the not-so-good isn’t really BAD; it’s just stuff we’ve had to adjust to and deal with. And the surprise non-issue: the small square footage we live in!

We wondered why the national park in Nevada is called Great Basin, and we learned. . .

We revisited one of our favorite Utah parks: Capitol Reef. We booked a 4-hour tour of remote Cathedral Valley…

We revisited some of our favorite parks in Utah: Arches, and Cedar Breaks, and saw the new-to-us parks: Hovenweep Nat’l Monument, Natural Bridges, and the Needles District of Canyonlands. We also visited Corona Arch, on BLM land outside of Moab.

We continued to work our way west and south, from Cheyenne, Wyoming, down poorly maintained I-25 in Colorado, to northern New Mexico and eastern Arizona.

In Missouri, we stayed at Echo Bluff State Park and explored the surrounding area.

In Kentucky, we first stayed near Mammoth Cave National Park.

We didn’t stay long in Florida, because we didn’t want to miss the spring…

3 1/2 months. That’s how long it took…