Planning your National Park Vacation can be almost as fun as taking the vacation. That is if you don’t let overwhelm take over. Using our 4 Simple Steps you can create the plan for an amazing memory filled vacation.
It’s super easy to put together your National Park Itinerary if you look at the planning process as putting together a puzzle.
- First you gather the pieces
- Then you create the frame
- Then you organize the pieces
- Last you fill in the pieces where they best fit
So let’s take a look at what those 4 steps to planning a National Park itinerary look like in action.
What makes a Great National Park Vacation Itinerary?
When we travel, I am passionate about organization. I like to be prepared and know what to expect next. Brad can be pretty impulsive, deciding at the last minute to follow a promising road sign or check out a site someone mentioned at our lunch stop. It didn’t take much time to realize that we had to find a way to meld those 2 personalities together. And we did! Our National Park Vacations are AMAZING!
The result is a simple, low stress, planning process that will work for any travel personality. In this article I have outlined the 4 Simple Steps we follow when planning a trip. If you follow these steps your next trip will be YOUR BEST TRIP EVER!
Of course great tools make all the difference! I’ve included several tip sheets and
planning tools to help you along the way.
4 Simple Steps To Planning An Amazing National Park Vacation
Step 1: Gather the Pieces
Once you’ve decided your destination, start generating a list of fun or interesting things to do, cool places to spend the night and yummy places to eat. It’s pretty easy to put a long list together in a short period of time.
Your Goal in This Step: Create a HUGE list of ideas. Do not edit. Just create the list!
Brainstorm Ideas
- Of course the first place to start is with the Internet. Google your destination and then branch out as you learn more.
- Although the internet is the most accessible resource, I still dip into travel books. Our book shelves are exploding with National Park books and our family loves to gift them to us as they know we will use them. When we take our grandkids on a trip, we gift them books about the park in advance. I’ve found if I keep the books simple and engaging, they actually read them and are so much more excited about the adventure.
- I also order the free travel guides from city and state tourism sites. These are often filled with ideas for little side trips that you don’t find elsewhere. You’ll find our coffee table littered with travel materials for our current dream trip! I also find it easier to get Brad involved in the idea generating process if I put these free guides in his favorite reading places (cough, cough did anyone mention bathroom reading material!)
- And more recently I’ve been using Chat GPT. I’ve gotten some great ideas by giving it a list of things we liked doing in other National Parks and asking it for suggestions for our coming trip.
Spend as much or as little time on this as you want. For me, it’s the step that expands or shrinks depending upon how far ahead I get started. In theory I could research a whole trip in 4-5 hours and be ready to hit the road. But where’s the fun in that? I usually poke at it a little at a time over several months, savoring the coming adventure.
Compiling your List of Itinerary Ideas
Make this step super easy to manage, here are 3 really great options. Pick the one that best fits your personality!
- Option 1 is to go to paper. Paper works well if everyone is in the same household. You can easily keep a binder on the kitchen counter and family members can add to it as ideas pop up.
- Option 2 is a spreadsheet like Google Docs because it’s easy for me to add to it from any of my devices. Your phone while at the dentist, your office while browsing during your lunch, the iPad while watching TV in the evening. And best of all you can share it with others joining your trip.
- Option 3 is the Notes app on iPhones. My non-techy husband actually prefers using this over a spreadsheet because it is so simple. The easier it is to add ideas the more ideas you will gather! So I’m more than happy to go along with his preference. Of course I can copy to a spreadsheet later!
Reminder: The more ideas the better! No editing yet!
Step 2: Create Your Frame
Your Goal in This Step:
- Outline Your Days
- Plot your Major Stops on a Map
- Capture where you will Sleep
Map It
Grab a map and plot your Destination and the other Major Stops you will probably make on your adventure. Sometimes I use a page from an old paper atlas. Other times I list them all in MapQuest or Google Maps where it’s easy to drag them into different orders. Being a digital gal, my personal preference is an online map. However, it is a whole lot easier to share with my husband when it is a highlighter on a big old map that we can chat about over dinner. Whatever your style, what’s important is that you get a visual of your overall Route.
Outline Your Itinerary
Now outline your daily itinerary by logging what you put on your map. In creating your frame you will only fill in where you will likely sleep each night. General location is fine, no need to get specific with hotel/campground name yet. Don’t spend more than 15 minutes on this step. Once you start filling in your activities you will likely make adjustments so it’s way to early to dig that deep.
Step 3: Organize and Prioritize Your Activities
Now it’s time to organize and prioritize all those great ideas you’ve gathered into 4 categories:
- MUST DO and it requires a reservation
- MUST DO but no reservation required (or last minute reservations are OK)
- LIKE TO DO but if something more interesting pops up or if time doesn’t allow it could slide and we wouldn’t be heart-broken
- NOPE it just doesn’t sound interesting anymore
Get everyone involved in prioritizing!
This is the time to get your traveling partners involved. If it’s just the 2 of you, then open a bottle of wine and spend a date night talking about
each one. If it’s your family or a group of friends set up a voting system.
You should keep the MUST DO list to a manageable size. For us, that is just one or two of activities a day. It can be exhausting to overfill your days with MUST DO activities. Don’t forget, this is a vacation not a job. So leave wiggle room that allows you to choose to sit and enjoy the amazing views over your morning coffee or explore the shores of a lovely lake.
Don’t be afraid of a large LIKE TO DO list. You are going to bring this list with you on your trip. Some days you will want to do more, some less. Having a large LIKE TO DO list gives you incredible flexibility.
Step 4: Fill in the pieces where they best fit
Now take all those MUST DO activities and start filling out your travel agenda. Just like the puzzle pieces, you will do a little adjusting and moving as you see how everything fits. Make reservations where required. It’s important to be flexible and willing to move items around if you are working on Bucket #1. For example I really wanted to camp IN Yellowstone National Park. Well by the time I started making reservations campground space was limited. Solution: I flipped the order of our trip and it fit perfectly!
After you have filled in your lodging plans and your MUST DO activities, go ahead and write in a several LIKE TO DO activities on each page. Remember, writing it down does not mean you are going to do it. The reason you are putting these on your list is for quick access if you want to add activities to any day while ON your trip.
PRO TIP: Take an extra step to ensure success: Most National Parks do not have cell phone or internet access. So you need a way to access
your key info and reservations. You can go old fashioned and print out the important stuff or save them as PDFs on your electronic device.
Tips for finding ideas for your vacation itinerary
Start gathering your ideas months ahead of your trip date. This doesn’t have to be a big project or take up a lot of time. I usually utilize little pockets of down time like googling on my phone while watching TV or enjoying a quiet lunch. Perhaps using a few minutes at work on my break or while waiting for my oil change.
What type of ideas should you capture? There are no rules. You will be reading along and when the thought pops into your head, “hmmm, that might be interesting” you should write it down. Don’t give into the desire to filter! I’ve been surprised several times when I would have filtered an idea thinking my husband wouldn’t be interested and he picked it out of the list with enthusiasm.
Tips for using Google
Here’s suggestions for using Google to find ideas. Lately Google has been serving up weird stuff if you just enter “What to do in Glacier National Park”. But if you get specific you can get great ideas.
- Google for blog posts using something like “blogs Glacier National Park”. Bloggers share their personal experiences so you get a really good flavor for how well their adventures match your travel style.
- Then get more specific with your favorite activities like “Hiking in ….” “Rafting in ….”, “Fishing in ….”
- Start looking for interesting places to sleep with “Places to Stay in…..”, “Camping in ….” “Cabins in…”
- Expand your search to the whole state for unique things to do while on the road “What to do in Maine“. Little side trips can really break up your long drive and make the road miles go much faster.
Other on-line resources
- Of course your first stop should be the National Park’s website. Some of the parks have incredibly detailed content. And then some don’t! But start here. At minimum you can get the park map so you can plot your days.
- Pinterest has tons of Pins for each National Park. Create a vacation board and share it with family members so they can add to the list!
- Visit the State’s Tourism website, usually they have books to mail as well.
- Check out the Gateway Cities on line for example “What to do in Estes Park” (Rocky Mtn NP). Chamber of Commerce and Visitor Bureau sites are full of info.
Are you flying?
Once you have your frame in place you can more easily see your airport options. I’ve found it’s worth spending 30 minutes on this step to ensure you are getting the best pricing. For example for a trip to the Utah National Parks, once my map was colored in, it became obvious that we could fly into Las Vegas for very little extra driving time compared to my original plan of Salt Lake City. I know from past experience that Vegas Flights and Rental Cars are often significantly cheaper so I will want to explore the difference and decide if it is worth a few extra hours of driving. Another example is when we spent 10 days in Montana, I would never have thought to consider flying into Spokane WA without this map. Turned out to be the best deal and the best route once we finalized our plans.
So you see why I suggest mapping your route before you book anything!
Finding amazing places you want to sleep each night
It’s a good idea to research lodging options early in case you need reservations. So include logging these as if they were an activity in your brainstorming step. Many National Parks and Gateway cities fill up fast during peak seasons. Others have plenty of options that give you flexibility. The less flexibility, the more urgent that you make those reservations early.
Some tips for great lodging locations:
- Check the park’s website to see when hotels and campgrounds start taking reservations. Many of those spots go on the first day reservations are open, some 6 moths in advance.
- The bigger the park, the better it is to stay IN the park to maximize your day.
- July and August drive bigger crowds into the parks.
- If there are a lot of gateway cities, it will be easier to find camping/lodging options outside the park.
- National Forests surrounding the park area great option for campers. These often have great campgrounds that need no or little advance reservations
As you can see, it’s fairly easy to put together a plan for your vacation that will create a lifetime of memories. So start now capturing ideas to complete your National Park itinerary!
