What a great blog. Photos are beautiful and was fun to read. I'm FIREd also and have been to many Nat Parks in all 50 states but never in one mega trip like you guys. Also have a mini van but find I generally like to set up a tent. I'm in Calif so have lots of the big parks only a few hours away which is really nice.
Thanks so much! That's really cool. I think overall, California is probably our favorite state, or at least in the top 3.
What a nice adventure.
You are inspiring me to visit all Norwegian National Parks. I have been to a number of them, but there are many left that I haven't visited.
How was it to work parttime during this trip? I understand you could the financial boost from a job, but did it feel like "work" and did it influence your experience in a negative way? Or was it positive to have some obligations during your trip?
Yeah, it's a totally reasonable question. At the beginning, I had the part-time work at my company and editing photos to worry about on a day-to-day basis. I think having something "different" to do every few days, and having a reason to take a break from travel and sit down at a laptop for a day, added variety and challenge to my life, and it was really good for me.
Later on in the trip, we launched this blog, and Lauren picked up a small freelance gig too, so suddenly we had this MASSIVE passion project to work on in addition to all that, and really it became a bit too much when combined with all the travel. But we did it anyway, and overall I'm still really glad we did.
I think my advice would be that if you want to really enjoy working while traveling full-time, keep the work to about 8-12 hours per week.
So, which parks were your favorites, and which did you feel were a waste of time?
I've only visited Carlsbad Caverns and Big Bend and would love to visit more, though my wife is not a big fan of long hikes.
We actually kept a ranked list of every park along the way. Obviously it's totally subjective, but some of our favorites were Yosemite, Death Valley, and Hawai'i Volcanoes. We didn't find that Hot Springs was very interesting at all. If you subscribe to the blog's newsletter (bottom of each page on the site), you'll get an email when we eventually post the whole ranked list of 61 in the next month or two.