Retirement Dreams: Our Trip of a Lifetime

Yellowstone National Park

My husband Bob and I love the National Parks, and have made a point of visiting these treasures during our travels. So far we have visited 25 of the 58 National Parks, as listed below:

Acadia National Park
Badlands National Park
Bryce Canyon
Carlsbad Caverns
*Crater Lake - Oregon
*Glacier - Montana
Grand Canyon
Grand Teton
Heleakala
Hawaii Volcanoes
Joshua Tree
*Kings Canyon
*Mount Rainier
*Olympic
*Petrified Forest
*Redwood
*Rocky Mountain
Saguaro
*Sequoia
Shenandoah
*Theodore Roosevelt
Wind Cave
*Yellowstone
*Yosemite
Zion

We visited 11 of those parks (the ones with asterisks) in one trip! In 2010 we took a fabulous trip that we designated the “Trip of a Lifetime” since we don’t think that we will ever get that ambitious again. We traveled 14,000 miles in five months , and not only got a good tour of those 11 National Parks, but also Custer State Park, the Cooley Dam and some other wonderful state and federal parks. We even traveled over to Vancouver Island in British Columbia Canada. Since Bob and I love wine, our trip had to include a tour of the California, Oregon and Washington wine country. We bought ourselves many wonderful bottles of wine, and then were presented with the problem of what to do with them when we entered Canada. We had no idea that you were not allowed to bring the wine over into Canada without paying a huge amount of taxes. We were in Olympic National Park before we took the ferry over to Canada, so we rented a small climate controlled self storage container in Port Angeles (the monthly rate was only $50.00). We would have had the wine shipped home, but we live in New Jersey and they do not allow wine to come into the state. On the way home we had the misfortune of breaking a trailer axle and got waylaid in Santa Fe New Mexico for nearly three weeks. We were going to stop in Santa Fe anyhow, but we got to know it much better that we expected to. If you are going to get stuck somewhere, it’s certainly not a bad place to hang out. We quite enjoyed it even though at this point we were anxious to get home. Outside of that the trip was one of the most memorable experiences that we will ever have.