My sister gave me a super cute water bottle for my birthday, with spaces to stick pretty stickers for each national park you’ve visited. I happily decorated the bottle with 44 stickers and only later realized I made a mistake: I stuck on the Wind Cave sticker instead of Mammoth Cave. AARRRGH!!! So now we have to go to Wind Cave National Park asap. Oh, darn.
The problem is that Wind Cave is in South Dakota and we are in Virginia, so we can’t do a quickie loop like we just did in the Carolinas. And while we’re all the way out there, shouldn’t we do some hiking, maybe in the Colorado Rockies? YES.
So here’s what I’ve thrown together. No idea when we’ll actually be able to do this trip, but here it is for future reference:
- Kentucky Horse Park in Lexington, KY (about a six-hour drive from home, great place to camp)
- Evansville, IN (3-hour drive, cute-looking downtown, stuff to do?)
- Jefferson City, MO (4.5-hour drive, state capital)
- Leavenworth, KS (3-hour drive, history?)
- Sioux Falls, SD (5-hour drive, falls!)
- Custer, SD (4-hour drive, we love Custer State Park!)
- VISIT WIND CAVE NATIONAL PARK! EARN THAT STICKER!
- Cheyenne, WY (4-hour drive, seems cool)
- Ft Collins, CO (only an hour south of Cheyenne, but I love it there)
- Steamboat Springs, CO (3 hours west, not sure there’s anywhere to camp, but sounds amazing)
- Aspen, CO (3 hours south; I’m assuming great ski towns are also great hiking towns)
- Vail, CO (2 hours from Aspen, great ski town=great hiking town)
- Leadville, CO (45 minutes south, the highest town in CO and home of Mt Elbert, the tallest mountain in CO)
- Salida, CO (1 hour south, we’ve driven through and wanted to try staying there)
Then we have a decision point: head back east? J says if we’re going all the way out there we have to go to Big Bend. So let’s look at that:
- Taos, NM (3 hours south, wanted to go but didn’t get there when visiting Santa Fe)
- Roswell, NM (4.5 hours south, I imagine there’s fun UFO-themed stuff there?)
- Guadelupe Mountains National Park (2 hours south, we’ve been wanting to do more there since Big Trip #1!)
- Marfa, TX or Alpine, TX (2ish hours south, we’ve had fun in Marfa and also in Alpine)
- Big Bend National Park (2.5ish hours south. Love love love love love it there.)
- Austin, TX (8 hours east; love camping there and we’ve struggled to find good places to stop along the way so maybe we just power through the long drive)
- Galveston, TX (3.5 hours east, has a big state park campground)
- New Orleans, LA (5.5 hours east; our second-favorite urban camping destination after Austin. Maybe stop in Lafayette again? or somewhere else? or do the long drive?
- Montgomery, AL (4.5 hours northeast, we enjoyed it enough to try again)
- Atlanta, GA (2.5 hours northeast, to stay in our cousins’ driveway)
- Asheville, NC or Charlotte, NC (3.5-4 hours northeast; love Asheville but haven’t been to Charlotte in a while)
This has evolved into a pretty massive itinerary! If we spent just one night in each location (which would be a nightmare), it’s a 25-night trip. We’d want to bump that up to a couple nights in the hiking areas, and probably 5 nights in Big Bend, and 3 or 4 in Austin and New Orleans. So let’s say 44 days. And we would have to go late enough in the spring or early in the fall to avoid snow in the mountains, or maybe do the loop backwards in the spring to give the mountains more time to melt…
I made a map!
April 2026 trip? What do you say, J? (J said: sounds great, but there’s no way it’ll only take us 44 days! I suspect he’s right!)
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