Planning Our National Parks Trip

When we have time for a vacation, our first thought is always "What parks can we go to?" This May, after Brian graduated, we had 2 weeks to spend on vacation. So how did we decide where to go?

1) Amount of Time - What can we see in 2 weeks? You could spend the whole 2 weeks at some parks and still wish you had more time. Other parks you only need a couple days. Two weeks seems like a lot, but you have to figure travel time, too! How much time are you willing to spend in the car?

2) Amount to Spend - Sure, 2 weeks is probably enough time to go to Alaska and see a park or 2, but that requires an expensive plane ticket. At this point, we were looking for an affordable trip.

3) Location of the Parks - First, what parks are near each other? I grouped parks together and looked at what the routes would look like if we visited that group. How much time would we spend driving? Does the route make sense? Is there anything else we might want to see along the way? This breakdown gave us 3 options: Yellowstone area parks, SW parks (Big Bend, Saguaro, etc), or SE parks.

4) Time of Year - This is probably the most important deciding factor on all of our trips. Where can you go this time of year? When you're going to be outside literally ALL of the time, you need to know what the weather is going to be like. Half of Yellowstone wouldn't even be open in mid May, so we decided to go farther south. It turns out that May is the off-season for the SW parks because it is SO hot and dry! So that brought us to the SE.

Based on all of these factors, we decided on a trip to Mammoth Cave, Great Smokey Mountains, and Congaree National Parks. This gave us about a week at the Smokies, a day and a half at Congaree, and one full day at Mammoth Cave. We were originally going to try and squeeze in a trip to the ocean, but decided against it. This trip was affordable, and the weather was great! And while I'm sure we could have spent more time at the Smokies, the timing was about right overall.

So, are you ready to plan your next trip to some National Parks?

**Update: Here are links to each section of our trip
Great Smoky Mountains - Backcountry
Great Smoky Mountains - Cosby/Big Creek
Congaree National Park
Mammoth Cave National Park