National parks
I guess because the 11,600 miles needed to visit all 30 MLB ballparks was not a sufficiently large challenge, I looked for a larger one. Visiting all 46 national parks in the contiguous US (well, 50 if you include Dry Torgugas National Park, Channel Islands National Park and Isle Royale National Park which are accessible only by plane or boat and Biscayne National Park, which is underwater) is a challenge in itself, but if I were to undertake this challenge I would probably include the 116 national monuments and maybe the 30 national memorials as well. This would be a monumental (so to speak) undertaking involving nearly 200 destinations, probably more than 100 travel hops and at least 8 months of travel – long enough that park winter closings become an issue. Whether it is feasible in a single year is an open question. But I did go so far as to plot a route that would get me to all monuments and memorials efficiently in one very long tour. This route would get me close to most of the national parks, too, so adding them would probably not boost the travel miles by more that another 1,000 miles. But national parks are not one-day destinations, so including them adds at least another 2 months to the timetable. My rough estimate for the monuments and memorials only: about 17,000 miles (plus maybe another 4,000 truck miles getting to the destinations from the RV parks) in 77 hops and 6 months.
A truly massive undertaking. And it makes me wonder: has anyone done it?
This is probably not something for which there is an official “done it” list. Part of the problem is that it is a moving target. The list of monuments and memorials changes frequently. In fact, it is likely that the list would change by the time I finished the tour.
Again, not a tour that I am likely to actually make. But, damn! Wouldn’t that be the fodder for some really good blog posts?
National monuments