Designing the Ultimate National Park Road Trip: A Test Drive for Early Retirement Travel (Part 1)

We packed up our minivan and set out on an epic adventure spanning eight states. Our journey took us from our Illinois home to the dramatic landscapes of Utah, the towering peaks of the Rocky Mountains, and the rugged beauty of South Dakota’s Black Hills. Along the way, we visited four national parks, two national memorials/historic sites, and two state parks—all while leveraging travel rewards to keep costs low.

Table of Contents: Our Two-Week National Park Adventure
This trip was packed with so much adventure that we’ve broken it down into a series of blog posts. Click below to explore each leg of the journey:

• Part 1 – Introduction and Planning (You are here)
• Part 2 – Outbound Travel & Little Jerusalem Badlands
• Part 3 – Utah: Arches & Canyonlands National Park
• Part 4 – Rocky Mountain National Park & YMCA of the Rockies
• Part 5 – South Dakota: Badlands, Mount Rushmore, and Custer State Park
• Part 6 – The Road Home
• Part 7 – Lessons Learned: What Worked, What Didn’t, and What We’d Change

The ‘Why’ Behind the Trip
This two-week adventure was a proof of concept to test what it would be like to accomplish one of our early retirement dreams, a multi-month trip with our kids to visit as many national parks as possible. We designed this experiment to align with our son’s fourth-grade national park pass (Every Kid Outdoors). His dream of seeing Arches National Park started when he was just five, learning about Utah during our first year of homeschooling. With financial independence on the horizon, we saw this as a golden opportunity to test our travel strategies before we commit to a multi-month road trip once we reach FIRE (Financial Independence, Retire Early).

A goal of this trip was to answer these questions:

• Could we affordably manage lodging and transportation on an extended road trip?
• How does timed entry work and what are the crowds like at popular national parks?
• Would we enjoy this type of travel?

But beyond the logistics, this trip had deeper motivations:

• Strengthen family bonds by sharing unforgettable experiences.
• Break free from burnout and step away from the daily grind.
• Push our comfort zones and prove that long-term travel is possible, even with kids.

Building the Itinerary
We planned the destinations of the trip by identifying two main highlights. The first was Utah and Arches National Park because that was our son’s dream for his fourth-grade national park pass. The next highlight was Badlands National Park and Custer State Park. South Dakota was a destination we had hoped to see the previous summer but weren’t able to do that year. The Rocky Mountains and other locations were framed around these highlights.

Prioritizing Experiences Over Exhaustion
We intentionally didn’t try to see everything in each region, and Utah was a prime example. Zion, Bryce Canyon, and Capitol Reef National Parks were destinations we wanted to see, but it would have stretched our travel five hours further west! We felt the added windshield time would have consumed too much of our two-week trip.

Our goal was to spend one or two full days at each national park. Also, southern Utah temperatures frequently reached 105°F in late summer, and we didn’t think the family would enjoy being in the intense heat for two weeks. Ultimately, we gave ourselves permission to Just Say No and pin these missed destinations on the map for future trips.

Fourth-Grade National Park Pass
As we said earlier, this trip was timed around our son’s fourth-grade national park pass called Every Kid Outdoors. The pass allows the fourth grader and the entire family to get free access to hundreds of parks, lands, and waters for an entire year. They consider a family to be all children under 16 and up to three adults. The pass is valid beginning September 1 and ending August 31 of the student’s fourth-grade year. The pass covers entrance or standard amenity day use fees at Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, Bureau of Reclamation, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Forest Service, and U.S. Army Corps of Engineers sites. Some fees, like camping, parking, and special tours, are not covered. Also private businesses that manage some facilities may not honor the pass.

At the time this post was written, you can follow these steps to get your Fourth Grade Pass:

1. Go to everykidoutdoors.gov and navigate to “Get Your Pass”. The website is a little tricky to get the pass because they make it an interactive game, so just follow the infographic below.
2. Print off a paper copy of the pass and take it to your nearest national park for validation. The paper pass will have additional instructions, too. We recommend you get the pass in September, plenty of time before your first major trip.
3. At your first park, have the fourth grader hand the paper pass to a ranger at the visitor center. The fourth grader must be present.
4. The ranger will give you a plastic card that the fourth grader may need to sign. To be extra safe, you may want to call the visitor center ahead of time to make sure they have the plastic cards. That is it, you are now ready for a year of national park adventures!

Leveraging Flexibility: Crafting the Perfect Travel Window
Homeschooling gave us the time flexibility to visit the National Parks while most other families were in school. However, we did not want to take the two-week trip any earlier than the summer because I was in the second year of a new job and had already taken a week off for our Disney World trip last fall. Read more about my career change and our trip to Disney World in another post titled From Career Catalysts to Disney Dreams: Our 10-Month Journey towards Financial Independence and Family Growth.

We settled on the second and third weeks in August because most families would be back in school, and our fourth-grade national park pass was valid until the end of August. That would mean the pass would expire a week after our trip.

Financing Time Off: Overcoming the Mental Barriers
The first obstacle of the trip was to request two weeks off from my job. I had only taken a two-week vacation once before in my entire career, and it felt like an unrealistic request for my new job. Nothing about my request was against the company’s vacation policy, but asking for that much time off still caused me stress. I was even willing to take unpaid leave as a last resort just to make this trip happen. Fortunately, the progress we had made towards our Financial Independence goals did give me more confidence, and to my surprise, the request was approved without question.

Eating on the Road: Saving Money & Avoiding the ‘Hangries’
When it comes to food, our family is a little weird, but we own it. We typically pack our food for travel because our kids have allergies. The practice is much healthier and saves money by not eating out every meal on the road.

We rationalize our eating decisions like this… Going to a restaurant at the end of the day means first waiting 45 minutes to be seated, then over an hour to eat and wait for the bill. So we feel like avoiding restaurants saves us time and decision fatigue, plus eating out too much just makes our bodies feel gross.

By packing our food, we get to eat what we are used to and what we know our kids will eat. We do still eat out on days when we have planned for it and when dining can be enjoyable, not when we are crashing at the end of the day from a severe case of the ‘hangries’.

Packing: Preparation and Experimentation
My wife and I try to improve our packing skills on every trip. This time we experimented with a few new items that could serve us better on longer adventures and, eventually, our multi-month national park trip. The following list contains some of the more unique items that we packed.

• 53 Quart AC/DC Powered Cooler & Freezer
• 0.7 Cu. Ft. Mini Microwave Oven
• 6 Rubbermaid Totes
• 6 Quart Instapot

If you want to read more about our packing list and what did NOT work, check out Part 7 – What We Learned.

Driving: Maximizing Comfort Without Losing the Spirit of Adventure
Our family is comfortable driving up to eight hours in one day. We try to break that up into four hours before lunch and four hours after lunch. Our enjoyment tends to suffer if we stretch it longer or drive at night. On some drive days, we added a mini-destination hike at the beginning or end of the day to burn off our kids’ most abundant resource, energy.

The Minivan Upgrade: Comfort Over Cargo
Another addition to our driving comfort was a minivan instead of the 2013 Toyota Tacoma Double Cab pickup we had used on previous road trips. We purchased a white 2020 Chrysler Pacifica from a dealer one month before the trip. It wasn’t our intention to get the vehicle immediately before the trip from both the stress and the reliability standpoints. However, we had been shopping for years, and even though used minivan prices had dropped a little from their peak in 2022, prices were still elevated. The immeidiacy of the trip motivated us to pull the trigger on purchasing a minivan. To hedge against the reliability risk, the used vehicle only had 27,000 miles, and we had it inspected by the mechanic of our choosing before the sale. For more information on how we bought the minivan, see Clark Howard’s guide for buying a used vehicle.

The van had video screens for both kids, which we could have done without. We are not big fans of tablets or screens in general. They are our “Nuclear Option” to be used as a last resort. Possibly our favorite accessory was the WeatherTech floor liners that were still in the vehicle from the previous owner. We doubled down and purchased after-market seat covers that were spill and stain-proof before our trip. The extra armor for the interior came in handy after dusty hikes in Utah.

Lodging: Making Travel Hacking Work for Us
During the trip, we stayed for 15 nights at seven different locations. Our goal was to stay three or four nights at each destination with the intent of feeling less rushed and more like we had a home base. Credit card rewards covered over half of our lodging nights during the trip. I have to admit it was not the most efficient use of our points, but we chose to optimize for the experience, not the redemption rate.

We learned about credit card travel rewards from the free ChooseFI Travel Rewards 101 course.

Call to Action
This trip was a turning point for us. It wasn’t just about seeing epic landscapes—it was about proving to ourselves that slow, intentional, and financially savvy travel is possible. Please don’t stop here. Think about the following recommendations to improve your family adventures, and if you have any questions about the topics discussed in this post, please comment below.

• Push past your comfort zone when requesting time off. You might be surprised by the answer.
• Strategically break up long driving days. Adding small adventures en route makes the journey just as enjoyable as the destination.
• Optimize travel rewards for experience, not just cost savings. Sometimes the best redemption is the one that lets you have the trip of a lifetime.

Ready for the full adventure? Click below to explore each leg of the journey!