The other option is to take the 2.5 hour (?) ferry ride [to Dry Tortugas]. I spoke to someone who took the ferry, and he said that about a third of the people got sea sick.
We took the ferry on a very windy day and I don't remember anybody getting seasick, but I wasn't hanging around the bathrooms. I do remember that it was a rough ride, and the boat would slam down on the waves occasionally. And the wind made for terrible snorkeling.
At the fort, we happened upon a group of people sitting up against an interior wall, eating, with some NPS employees sitting around a little farther away from the wall. There was some construction going on, and we thought maybe it was contract workers taking a break. But there was just a really weird vibe that we couldn't put our finger on.
Shortly after we were there, they shut down the park because of the influx of migrants coming from Cuba and landing on Dry Tortugas. So I'm sure what we saw was some of the first ones who tried it, before social media got wind of the opportunity and everybody started doing it. That's what made Dry Tortugas particularly memorable.
I like scenery but I don't looooove it; grandeur doesn't really register (turns out my sister is the same way, so maybe it's genetic). And I'm not into hiking. So most national parks are merely okay to me. But I'll always remember the Narrows in Zion, where we walked about 10 miles, most of it in the water. That was so cool. And more memorable than going up to Observation Point, which is all about the scenery.
In Glacier National Park, we went to a glacier. My boyfriend was careful to say we were walking to the glacier, not hiking, and didn't mention the distance. I took an Inside Passage cruise in Alaska a long time ago, so I've seen glaciers, and big ones, and ones that were calving, but I don't think I'd ever walked up to the edge of one, so I was game. It turned out to be 10 miles or so, and I do remember the icy edge of the glacier, and that the bottoms of my feet were sore for about the last mile or two.
The scenery was about what I'd expected. What I remember the most was walking through a group of mountain goats or sheep or whatever that were hanging around on both sides of the trail. Some of them were fighting and I'll never forget the sound of their horns hitting each other. It was
loud...sounded like a gunshot.
Yellowstone? We rode our bikes on a dirt road to the back of Grand Prismatic Spring, and came upon a herd of bison straddling the road. I didn't know at the time that they're dangerous, but we rode smoothly and silently through them, and they ignored us. Same on the way back. I remember that as much as I remember Old Faithful.
White Sands. We walked around on the dunes during the day, and then went on a full moon bike ride, which I gather they don't offer any more. It used to be twice a year, and you could ride your bike on the vehicle-free road after dark. That was a hoot.
Everglades. We parked the motorhome out on the highway and rode our bikes in, to do the Shark Valley route. We got to ride past the line of cars waiting to go in, and stopped on the back side of the booth and I handed the guy my senior pass and driver's license, and he said something about how other people can't use that pass, and I said, "That's me." And I added, "Dude, I'm on Medicare." (Senior pass age is only 62.) He paused again and said, "Well keep doing what you're doing!" Ha! Oh, and we saw some alligators.
Saguaro National Park. We stopped the car on the side of a dirt road and were standing there looking around and both felt a
whoooosh behind us and looked up and it was what looked like a Kenyan runner who hadn't made a sound but we'd
felt him go by. That was over 20 years ago and that's still what both of us remember from Saguaro National Park.
Thanks for the tip on RMNP. I do miss the days of just showing up at a NP and being able to do what you wanted without worrying about reservations. Maybe it’ll all calm down in a few years.
I consider myself incredibly lucky to have started traveling fulltime 20 years ago, and going pretty much everywhere I wanted to go before the crowds got really bad, and reservations are needed at many of the parks. While it's become really bad since covid, I remember driving down from Arches in June 2018; we'd gone up real early because we were leaving town that day, and this is what the entrance looked like just before noon:
www.gjhikes.com
The following morning we drove up near the Mountain Tower and took an easy hike & enjoyed the autumn colors before hitting the road to head back home.
