Reddit reviews National Geographic Secrets of the National Parks: The Experts' Guide to the Best Experiences Beyond the Tourist Trail (National Geographics Secrets of the National Parks)

Fantastic question u/ardnassac115, and I'm glad you asked it. For some background on me, I'm 25 and used to work full-time in a pretty serious career before deciding to return to graduate school full-time. This lined up for me, and is probably one of the few times in my life I'll be able to do something this long and live-changing. When in my life will I have the holy trinity of time, energy, and money again? I had budgeted through grad school to 1.) make sure I could go through grad school without working, and 2.) make sure I had enough leftover to do something like this before returning to work. I still live at home and my major monthly expenses are student loans, car payment/insurance, and a cell phone bill. I budgeted to make sure the cost of this trip, in addition to those expenses, could be covered while I was gone before returning to work. I hope that answers your question regarding saving up.

Planning the trip was difficult at first, but became easier over time. I've never done anything like this in my life and I had no idea what I was doing. The most important thing is to first decide how long you want the trip to be. Everything else comes afterwards. I decided 6 weeks because it'd be enough to see a lot while not killing me financially. Next, I knew I wanted to see national parks, but had no idea how. This helped me immensely. It's an "optimal route" to see all the national parks in the lower 48 states (note there have been two new NP additions since: Gateway Arch NP and Indiana Dunes NP). In what I'm sure is a cardinal sin of this sub, I took the fastest, most direct routes in the interest of time rather than looking for scenic routes most of the time. I cared more about time in the parks than pretty views from my car (although there were many). If you look at the order of my route and the route through that link, you'll notice it's very similar. After, I just started researching parks and seeing which ones I want to see the most, and which ones I could skip for now or save for the future. Once I had that down, I opened up an excel sheet and google maps and started actually mapping each day, how long the drives would be between destinations, what I wanted to do, where I'd sleep each night, and how long I'd spend at each destination. How long was decided during the research part on the parks I decided to see on this trip. For example, parks like Rocky Mountan, Zion, Grand Teton, Yellowstone, Yosemite, and the Grand Canyon all got 2 essentially full days because they were so big that I didn't think I could do all the things I wanted to do in a single day. Parks like Badlands, Great Sand Dunes, Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Kings Canyon, Sequoia, Carlsbad Caverns, Gateway Arch, and Cuyahoga Valley I knew could be done in a single, very packed day. To preface that, I'm in shape and did a lot of hiking at a pretty unhealthy (read: fast) pace, allowing me to do a multitude of trails each day to get everything. I'm not going to lie, it took me a ton of effort to route my trip and make sure it was within the time frame. I essentially made an itinerary for myself. It's not as rigid as I'm making it sound, as the only thing really holding me to schedule was reserving campsites or AirBnBs. Otherwise I'd be able to do that research a few nights prior and alter as I needed. On the flip side, when it's 7PM and you don't know where you're sleeping that night, that can be a scary thing if you're not used to it.

I want to emphasize my planning of each day at parks too. I touched on that above, but this blog, where the authors spent 52 weeks doing all 59 (at the time) national parks for the centennial in 2016, was extremely helpful. The pictures, descriptions, and other info were so valuable. My friend's dad caught wind I was doing this trip and lent me three national park guides: Fodors, National Geographic, and Lonely Planet. These were the most important for actually planning my days in parks, with Fodors being by far the most useful, National Geographic also being good, and honestly not much help from Lonely Planet. Just an FYI, the links are for the exact copies I used, but there are newer versions available that you should get if you look into it. A note on this - it saved me a tremendous amount of valuable time when I got to parks to already know exactly what I wanted to do. If I had extra time and could do stuff I didn't know about, that was great! But on packed days it helps to know where things are in each park and how reasonable your "want to do" adventures are for the time frame.

For road trip prep I had to buy or borrow some things I didn't have and got the rest from my house: sleeping bag, sleeping pad, bed comforter, tarp, tent, knife, bear spray, pepper spray, a road atlas, a lantern, an abundance of snacks (clif bars, larabars, peanut butter crackers, etc), national park passport, a good cooler for water/food, camp stove and bowls, matches, paper towels, hand sanitizer, and some other things that I'm surely not remembering. A good, solid backpack and some good water bottles are necessary. Multi-tools are useful. Don't forget some engine coolant and wiper fluid just in case. Don't forget to stop for an oil change if your trip is long enough. For clothing I put a suitcase in the back seat of my car and lived out of that between laundry. Also had a box with some of the above items in it along with toiletries and other essentials like baby wipes, phone charger, electric razor and charger, nail clippers, sandwich baggies, and a few other things.

Woooo, that was a long winded post! There is so much to think about and plan when doing something like this, and I'd be lying if I said a great deal of work didn't go into my plan. If this trip had been shorter, a lot of this wouldn't be necessary. Six weeks though, that's a long time away from home, completely on my own. Having never done something even close to this, I felt I needed to do a lot of this prep work to make sure this went as smoothly as possible. It did go very smoothly too, but I attribute a lot of that to planning. I hope that this essay response helps you understand the pre-trip process I went through a bit better. I'd be happy to answer any questions you have!