Hey there, I’m Stephanie and I have an incurable case of wanderlust. The desire to go, see, experience and explore the surface of this wondrous planet. So I quit my job and started traveling the world. (Ha – not quite).
This blog is one component of my never-ending drive to strike a balance between home and away – an everyperson’s guide to the open road, skewed strongly towards national parks, public lands, and a diversity of ecosystems.
After graduating with bachelors degrees in biology and nutrition in a year long, long ago, I was faced with a no-brainer of a decision: find a temporary job so that I could continue paying rent on my college apartment or . . . don’t. I convinced my boyfriend (now husband) that moving into the car and road-tripping/tent-camping across the country the summer before graduate school was a far superior alternative.
I owned a small sedan and a flip-phone (the first gen iPhone had just recently come out). We clipped coupons for non-perishable goods and stockpiled a few box-loads of ultra cheap foods to last us on the road. We navigated the entire trip with a giant Rand McNally road atlas and free highway maps picked up along the way at state line visitor centers. It was truly a shoe-string endeavor. There was no Instagram; no #vanlife. A lot of folks tried to dissuade me from this purportedly crazy idea, but I would do it again in a heartbeat: it was amazing.
Since then, we’ve driven cross-country across North America at least a dozen times, spanning all four seasons. I joined the Travelblog community and remained an active member for years before deciding to pursue Road Trip Addict.
Our early road-trips relied heavily on car camping driven largely by budget necessity. As our experience grew, the allure of venturing into areas inaccessible by vehicle was too great to resist and we’ve been including backpacking excursions into our National Park trips since 2016. Now when trip planning, I tend to blend a mix of local lodging, backcountry treks, and front-country camping so that we can experience each location in the richest possible way.
Over the years we’ve been able to complete some bucket-list level itineraries: we’ve circumnavigated Mt Rainier on foot twice via the Wonderland Trail, hiked the full length of the Narrows in Zion National Park, and backpacked in the Core Enchantments zone of Washington’s Alpine Wilderness in the midst of the golden larches. I try to plan at least 2-3 week or longer trips each year, with shorter trips in between, but there’s still so much of the country, the continent, and the world remaining to explore.
A big part of my motivation with this blog is to enable others to feel confident exploring areas in the great wide open. As National Parks continue to rise in popularity, the planning and permit process becomes a bit more complicated every year. I believe deeply in the perseveration and conservation mission of the NPS, and perhaps this blog is one small way of encouraging others to fall in the love with the beautiful landscapes around us so that they (you!) may and to recreate responsibility while doing so.
Everything you read on Road Trip Addict comes directly from personal experience. I find trip-planning and research to be as enjoyable as the trip itself, so I delve headlong into the logistics that I later share here. The photos, trail descriptions, information and recommendations all come first hand. If you read it here, you can trust it’s true – or was true at the time of writing. I do my best to keep the guides updated as permit requirements and processes change.
Let’s go folks, the world’s waitin’ for us.
