Robert, Sarah, Ashlyn and Zoey — four of us out of Russellville, Arkansas. We have gone somewhere every year since 2016, and mostly we go to national parks: nineteen of them so far, usually reached by loading up the camper and driving a good deal further in a day than is strictly sensible.
Every trip starts life as a spreadsheet — drive times, park fees, who is cooking on which night, a column for what we budgeted and a column for what we actually spent. Months later it ends with a cooler in the back, a Cracker Barrel parking lot somewhere off the interstate, and one of us up before dawn because the good light does not wait. We cook most of our own meals, we sleep inside the park whenever a reservation comes through, and we put the money we save into the thing the girls will still be talking about in ten years: a cave tour, a boat out to a fort in the Gulf, a dune worth sledding down.
No two years look the same. Ten days around Arkansas with two other families and a rotating cooking roster came to under three hundred dollars each. Christmas at Universal and a week in the Florida Keys came to eight times that. Some years there is no camper at all — twelve nights in Ireland for the two of us, holding a spot on the parade route in Dublin on St Patrick's morning and finishing up in a castle in Donegal.
Between five parks across Texas, New Mexico and Arizona over one Christmas, Glacier and Yellowstone in a single 5,181-mile summer, and whatever the Ouachita Trail throws at us on a free weekend, it adds up to a lot of miles and a lot of nights in a sleeping bag. Death Valley and Joshua Tree are next, in October. The Grand Canyon rim to rim is waiting on a permit.
This is the log. A page for each trip: the day-by-day calendar we actually ran on, what it really cost, and the food we made out there.