There Are No Wrong Answers

North Cascades National Park (Photo by Zoë Reeve on Unsplash)

    If visiting North Cascades is somehow wrong, then I don't want to be right. And of course, it's not wrong. How could it be? But weighing a visit there versus a trip to overcrowded Glacier National Park is just one of the many choices we had to make. You can't go to every park. But it sure is tempting to try.

    The problem is, the National Parks weren't chosen at random. Each one has a boatload of awesomeness within, so it's almost impossible to choose where to go. You think you have a few ideas sussed out, and them something shiny catches your eye three states away that you have to visit. Looking through these books didn't exactly make choosing any easier.

    But look through them we did. Actually, we made the kids do it. They spent hours going through our growing library of resources and made up lists of their own. In the meantime, Anne and I were researching places where we wouldn't be stuck in traffic while waiting to get in. We recorded everything in our super-fancy, hand-made, linen-papered, archival-quality notebook.

We love a good underdog.

I think Anne really captured the sense of excitement with this stirring title.

    We slowly began to fill the pages with notes, campgrounds, local attractions and sample itineraries that pretty much got shot to hell.

This list never seems to get shorter.

Some of this actually panned out.

    We eventually had a route mapped out, with some firm dates attached to our selected parks . Next up: actually booking the campgrounds. *!Foreshadowing Alert!* It didn't quite go to plan.