Great American West Trip Planning | Barefoot Beachcombing

Great American West Adventure

Trip Planning

September 2017

If you didn't already know, Kate and Sue and I are taking a trip! We are going to Sue's cousin's wedding in Victor, Idaho. First, we are starting in Denver and are going to visit some National Parks and other attractions in Colorado and Wyoming. In an RV!! Go here to see the main page for the trip.

Because there were a lot of moving parts (needing to be certain places at certain times, when we were picking up the RV, the distance between the places we were visiting, etc.) and with this being a fairly long trip, a fair amount of planning was involved. And we are geeks!

Yellowstone and Grand Teton have a limited amount of campground space for RVs, so we needed to make sure that there were places we were able to spend the night ... legally and safely.

As you will see in the coming days, that meant that we stayed in campgrounds/RV parks just outside the park boundaries. This will end up working out great, though, as the cell phone service/WiFi is pretty much non-existent in Yellowstone.

The pictures below memorialize the process.

We plotted a route and then calculated the driving time (conservatively) between the places we wanted to go. Not a promotional plug, but we used a great website named Roadtrippers.com to plot out each day's route and the sites we wanted to see. It's a really great site and allowed us to easily piece together the trip. We used the giant Post It notes (stuck to the sliding glass door) to organize what each day was roughly going to include.

We used the resources on the National Park Service website, too The Park Service has great maps and guides on their website to help with planning what to visit in the parks. And true nerd/geek fashion, we created a shared Google Drive to store all the various tourism brochures, maps, and other trip documents.

We headed over to the local REI store and purchased a Federal Lands annual pass (also known as the America the Beautiful National Parks and Federal Recreational Lands Annual Pass). It provides access to more than 2,000 Federal recreation sites where entrance fees are charged include National Park Service and US Fish and Wildlife Service properties. This will save us money and time entering the national parks and it supports the parks, as well.