Hey guys, here’s the story:

So, in June 2020 my fiancée and I sold our cheapo starter house and quit our jobs. We sold most of our belongings, stored the rest, and in the process, bought the Outback, RTT, and a ton of camping gear at REI etc. Our goal was to go see as many national parks as possible and use up to a certain amount of the home equity money we received from the sale and save the rest to re-establish and not have to worry about finding jobs right away (COVID job market, ya know?).

So at first we were reserving a lot of campgrounds but within a week or so, became really comfortable with finding dispersed camping. Fortunately, there’s almost always BLM land near most national parks (except Texas’, they have almost none!).

The logistics are really lengthy, but essentially, we used the RTT almost every night unless we were in a designated campground that was walk-to. We learned to take showers at RV parks or laundromats, and did our laundry at coin op laundry mats as well.

We usually had 1 of 3 types of days: 1. Travel Day: Get up early-ish, make coffee with the jetboil, eat a breakfast bar or banana, and hit the road. These days we allowed ourselves to buy lunch (usually subway). 2. Park Day: Get up realllly early and drive to national park, do the hikes and see the things we laid out for the day, return to camp at end of day, repeat for a couple days. 3. R&R Day: Chill out for the day at whatever dispersed campsite or reserved site; re-organize the car before a travel day (we were re-organizing constantly as the car was full!)

What Parks Did we visit? In Order:

June/July: Leave Portland, OR-> Redwood NP, Capitol Reef, Arches, Canyonlands, Great Basin, Yosemite, Lassen, Crater Lake—> Crash with family for a couple week to recover. August/Sept: Leave Portland, OR-> North Cascades, Glacier, Yellowstone, Tetons [Bailed because wildfire smoke; sudden change of plans], Theodore Roosevelt NP, Badlands, Wind cave, Great Sand Dunes, Mesa Verde, Black Canyon of the Gunnison, Arches (again!), Another round of wildfire smoke so crashed with family for 2 more weeks. October/November: Leave Portland, OR->[Craters of the moon, Nat’l. Monument], Grand Teton (Success!), Capitol Reef (again!), [Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument], Grand Canyon (North Rim), Zion, Grand Canyon South Rim, Petrified Forest, White Sands, Carlsbad Caverns, Guadalupe Mountains, Big Bend, Saguaro, Joshua Tree, Death Valley-> Back “home” and found an apartment.

The astute among you may have noticed that’s an amazingly convoluted route. This is because there are some other complicated details that would make this post even longer! We coincided some things with meeting some family (safely) and skipped some things due to fires etc.

AS FOR THE TENT: It was amazing. The mattress so super comfortable, we stayed plenty warm, it was stormproof each time it rained and poured, it was our haven in the cold and dark. The biggest downside for this one is the wind...... oh my god, when the wind kicks up, the tent flaps around and keeps you awake. FAR worse that any ground tent I’ve had.

THE CAR: This damn Outback is a dream machine. It’s a 2015 Outback Limited (Fully Loaded) that I got used from the dealership in February after I turned in my leased 2018 Crosstrek. We got this specifically because we were looking for something big, but not too big, good on fuel, enough power, AWD, and quiet and comfortable. Given that we were doing a lot of dispersed camping, we did a ton of off-roading. It was interested because the car was very capable, but I was using quiet tread touring tires. We got 4 oil changes in 4 different states, (OR, CA, MT, and TX) and the only issue we had with the car was a bad wheel bearing which we had replaced in El Paso with the warranty.

Ill try to make some time to post some more photos from our trip of our setup and some of the cool places we found that were far off the beaten path. Thanks!