My heroes camping in Yosemite remind me that nothing lasts forever. The colder weather, late season hurricanes, holidays and life mean that I can’t keep up this pace of daily posts, especially since some of the remaining units will require longer trips to complete. I’ll try posting on Fridays for now. With that in mind, here’s a shot of the last lunar eclipse outside my favorite hotel in Gallup.
The National Parks Passport (which National Park Travelers Club members use to save visit stamps) divides the units into nine self-explanatory regions. The club has useful information for trip planning, and I log my park visits there too. The US Department of the Interior has reorganized their park unit regions a few times into something less useful for me, so I still use the map above to organize the site geographically. And the NPTC often does a better job keeping their park unit information completely up to date, compared with the NPS.
I visited all national park units in the contiguous 48 states in my electric car in the last four years; see my NPTC map below. Every state has at least one national park unit. If you want to see my visits in your state, ‘Click a State’ above, find your region and click the summaries to explore.
My first region completed was National Capital with 23 units, then Southwest with 42, Mid-Atlantic with 56, Rocky Mountain with 41, Midwest with 47 and North Atlantic with 44. Each of those links takes you to a summary of my park visits there. That leaves three extremely challenging regions to complete. The Western region includes Hawaii. The Pacific Northwest has Alaska. And the Southeast includes US territories in the Caribbean.
As I mentioned in my post on Cumberland Gap, this blog is partly an object lesson to show that traveling in an EV is a great way to visit our national parks. I can travel hundreds of miles per day, stopping briefly to charge, use the restroom and eat, and filling up costs me a fraction of my Prius. I use a CCS and a few RV plug adapters on rare occasions when they’re more convenient than a Supercharger, and I find charging locations with the PlugShare app. When I stay in state park campgrounds, I charge my car overnight without paying extra. Even if I were more concerned with my money than our climate, I would travel this way. And I love driving my Tesla.
I’ve only had range or charging trouble twice. Once in Kansas, I could not reach a park before closing due to poor planning on where to charge, but when I returned, Tesla had opened a new Supercharger nearby. (The car tells me whenever I’m heading out of range from the nearest Supercharger). Another time, the owner of the Dairy Queen in Needles California was blocking 3 out of 4 chargers all day with a truck, because he wanted to change the seasonal advertising on his sign. I called Tesla to let them know, which is what he should have done in advance. I’m not going to say traveling cross-country by EV is idiot proof, but I can do it, so it kinda is.
Yes, I’ve temporarily moved back in with my Mom.
Why? Well, when I went in early to pick up my Tesla from the shop, there were emergency vehicles on site due to a battery fire.
The good news is that I’ve had a wonderful time here, swimming, eating seafood and relaxing. I’m restricted to the area until Tesla releases my car (not damaged). Fortunately, New Bedford (above) has the best scallops in the world.
Hope to be heading back to California shortly, with a few more posts along the way.
So, my car is getting a tune-up, new tires and some new parts. Driving over 30,000 miles on some very rough roads has done some damage. Also, it’s really hot everywhere. Fortunately, my Mom is letting me stay in the northeast near the coast until I can get back on the road. After over 150 park units, it’s time to pause the blog for a couple weeks. Ciao.
To be fair, I have been busy with life, work, raising kids, etc. Now, it’s finally time to focus on something bigger.
As I write, several western states are fighting wildfires, red tide has killed a swath of marine life in Florida, methane is bubbling up from defrosting “permafrost” in Siberia, Tanzania has swarms of locusts, Germany and China are recovering from massive floods, and Australia stopped the UNESCO warning that the Great Barrier Reef is in danger.
All people should care about the climate crisis, because we only have this one world to share with all other living things. For me, it feels more personal, because I’ve traveled to all those places to see wildlife. So, it breaks my heart when I learn that the Great Barrier Reef (where I got PADI certified) has lost over half the coral since I visited. I still remember how beautiful it was, and I grieve for my kids and all in the future that it’s disappearing right now.
I understand how normal living distracts us, and how difficult and expensive it is to make changes. But what are we doing? Extinctions and collapsed ecosystems are permanent, and our survival is affected as the abundance of life diminishes. Why aren’t we changing faster?
I’m committed to changing how I travel. And in this blog, I’ll describe what I do differently now, and why. We’re going to discuss the issues, try to understand, and change. I may be older now, but I’m wiser too. And I know that time’s wasting, so my next post will be quicker, I promise.
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Happy blogging!