We’ve been pondering the choices ahead, and have made some decisions. Mostly, we’ve decided that the opportunity to go explore a bunch of the country’s best national parks in late August and September is too much to miss. The Four Corners region is one of the most densely packed areas of national parks, and some of the most famous and beautiful ones are here. \u00a0 We don’t know when we’ll get this chance again.<\/p>\n
If we head straight back<\/a> to home base, we’ll have about 850 miles to drive and we’d see maybe three or four great spots along the way. But if we take a convoluted route of about 1,500 miles through southern Colorado, Utah, and northern Arizona<\/a>, things get considerably more interesting. We will get to visit:<\/p>\n The added mileage will cost about $300 in fuel. We’ll also spend about $400 in additional campground fees. For that we’ll get four or five weeks of travel through 11 national parks. That’s a heck of deal for $700. Since we are spreading the cost out over a month, we can afford it more easily. \u00a0 It’s about $20 per day.<\/p>\n The real consideration is keeping up with work. The western national parks are generally out of range of cellular Internet and voice. A few campgrounds have wi-fi (which we know from past experience is unreliable), and a few spots can be reached from towns with cell phone service like Cortez CO. We’re going to have to juggle work and play carefully.<\/p>\n The idea is one we’ve used all along. When things are quiet, we scoot into a national park and drop off the network for a few days. Then, we drive to the nearest place where I can get online and Eleanor can catch up on groceries, laundry, etc., and settle in for a few days of work and homeschooling. Three or four days later, we move on to the next remote park and repeat. The challenge in the four corners region especially is that there’s a lot more “remote” territory than anything else.<\/p>\n It’s also much more expensive to park in a wi-fi enabled campground than in the national park campgrounds we favor, usually by a factor of two. Since we are trying to compensate for higher fuel prices, we’ve been tending to free and cheap campsites more than usual. The work periods will drive up our expenses. That’s a good motivator for me to get the jobs done as quickly as possible. Efficiency pays when you’re working and full-timing.<\/p>\n With all these competing factors, we can’t say we have a firm plan, only a route and a set of guidelines. So we can’t make reservations. We’ll just have to wing it, as usual. Sounds like fun to me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We’ve been pondering the choices ahead, and have made some decisions. Mostly, we’ve decided that the opportunity to go explore a bunch of the country’s best national parks in late August and September is too much to miss. The Four Corners region is one of the most densely packed areas of national parks, and some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[16,3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tour.airstreamlife.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1639"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tour.airstreamlife.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tour.airstreamlife.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tour.airstreamlife.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tour.airstreamlife.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1639"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tour.airstreamlife.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1639\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tour.airstreamlife.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tour.airstreamlife.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tour.airstreamlife.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n