We’ve been back home almost a week now and getting settled back into our usual routine. It feels like we’ve been away for months not weeks – perhaps the effect of having travelled 16,000 km.
We managed to fit in 14 US and Canadian National Parks, Monuments or Forests (Arches, Bryce, Grand Staircase-Escalante, Zion, Grand Canyon, Death Valley, Sequoia, Yosemite, Redwood, Olympic, Pacific Rim, Jasper, Banff, Waterton Lakes), 3 State Parks (Jackson Lake Colorado, Kodachrome Utah, Prairie Creek Redwoods California) and 5 Provincial Parks (Rathtrevor BC, Wells Gray BC, Dinosaur Alberta, Kakabeka Falls Ontario and Pancake Bay Ontario), not to mention a half dozen others that we drove through. The parks we visited include 7 UNESCO world heritage sites. We hiked and walked nearly 300 km. The list of place names we visited reads like a verse in Johnny Cash’s I’ve Been Everywhere.
Regrets? We didn’t spend enough time in many of these places. We could have spent multiple days hiking in Yosemite and we ended up not camping in Death Valley depriving us of the opportunity to explore a unique place. During the planning stages of this trip we were faced with the annoyance of finding out that national park campgrounds were fully booked months ahead, so we relied on advanced bookings in private campgrounds in lieu of taking our chances with the first come first served options (the US has a great network of primitive Bureau of Lands Management camping areas). Some of the private campgrounds were worth staying at but often a fair distance from the national parks. We also wanted to visit Haida Gwaii in BC but we would have needed to add another week onto the trip. We also passed up on taking the Pacific coastal roads through Oregon and Washington due to a lack of time. We are already talking about which places we would go back to.
When recounting the trip, some people ask why we left this city or that city off our itinerary. We were not interested in cities and in hindsight there is a lot more homogeneity in urban cityscapes than in the natural landscapes we saw. Most of everything we saw was stunning, beautiful, interesting, unique – for 5 weeks – without ever getting boring. We saw so much wildlife (bears, elk, eagles, hawks, condors, beavers, big horned sheep and even a moose). I don’t know if 5 weeks of city hopping would have made us happy (assuming our bank account could have even handled it). Anyway, to each his own…
Other positive things. We packed very well. Almost everything we packed we used regularly. The down duvets and pillows were the best thing we could have brought on a car camping trip when you’re sleeping on the ground often in the cold for 5 or 6 nights straight. Our best purchase in preparation for our trip was a Westinghouse portable generator. We went days at a time without an AC power source to recharge the camera and phones (the car plug in was not always practical when you had multiple devices to charge). “The Westinghouse”, as we call it, could be charged up at one of our infrequent motel stays or, in a pinch, in the car’s cigarette lighter and you would have a power source for 3 days after. It fits easily in a small day pack or under the seat of the car. Lots of different companies make them but we chose this one for portability. You can also buy a separate solar panel for charging.
The timing of our trip was really good. We were early enough to avoid the crowds at the big US parks but late enough for most of the higher elevations to be snow free. If we had been 2 weeks earlier we would have had snow on the ground in Yosemite and the Canadian Rockies in the higher elevations we visited. We caught the end of the spring flowers in the desert states and got to see the spectacular Rhododendrons on Vancouver Island.
I grew up on road trips. I was 3 months old when I went camping the first time with my family so you could say I come by this sort of travelling honestly. For my partner he loves the camping and outdoors but he’s not a fan of being in the car for long periods of time so we tried to break up the monotony of long drives by making sure we stayed a few days in one place (Utah, Vancouver Island, the Rockies, Winnipeg) or the odd hotel/motel stay. We also didn’t rely on self catering and cooking the whole trip. If we wanted to eat at a restaurant we did.
It’ll likely be a long time before we can take another giant road trip like this so we jumped on the chance. We have lots of incredible stories, stellar photos and a renewed energy that comes with spending extended periods in nature to keep us going until the next trip.
Thanks for reading. Now the daydreaming resumes for our next adventure.
sedativegunk 