Adventuring beyond through travel, food, and more.
Theodore Roosevelt National Park is a bit tricky to visit – it is remote for most of the country, split into 3 sections that are not close together, and for a solid half of the year the wind and snow keeps visitors away. For those who do come, you are blessed with views of badlands, historical buildings, prairie dogs, and wild horses. It is easy to enjoy 1 quick day in Theodore Roosevelt National Park!
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As with many national park sites in Arizona, it is easy to visit Petrified Forest in just one day. We chose 9 of the best things to do in Petrified Forest to cover in this post. We were staying in Flagstaff when we visited Petrified Forest, which is just under 2 hours drive from the park. While not close, we were visiting the nearby Wupatki and Sunset Crater National Monuments and stuck with our normal plan of limiting how many times we change lodging.
Petrified Forest National Park is home to large deposits of petrified wood, which are gemlike and stunning in the bright Arizona sun. It is a super easy park to visit with great freeway access and easy hiking. The only “strenuous” part of the trip will be the heat if you go in the summer and the wind that has few barriers on this stretch of land. Join us on our trip through this great Arizona National Park!
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Surrounded by Wind Cave, Jewel Cave, Mount Rushmore, and other national parks and monuments, Custer State Park is both a treat and unique compared to these other locations. After our visit, these are hands-down our family’s picks for the 4 best things to do in Custer State Park!
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Grand Canyon, like most busy national parks, is popular for a reason. It is stunningly beautiful, diverse, and easy to set your family up to have a fun 1 day in Grand Canyon. We, however, planned poorly and had the worst day instead! Like Canyonlands National Park, Grand Canyon is a park where you can just peek over the rim and get bored as you look on the same big ditch in the ground. We will help you avoid that fate!
We had originally come from Flagstaff, a fun town with a number of great restaurants and easy to find lodging that is also more affordable than those closer to the park. It is also a great base if you want to run over to Petrified Forest National Park or the interesting Walnut Canyon, Sunset Crater, or Wupatki National Monuments, as we did.
…We enjoyed the best family day in Wind Cave National Park! This is a fun park that can be enjoyed in a 1/2 day, full day, or more. Note: We receive a small commission for purchases made through links in this post.
Wind Cave, like Mammoth Cave, is named after the cave but includes a number of activities that are above ground and beautiful in their own right. While Wind Cave is a small park, it is close to a number of great parks in the Black Hills, South Dakota area including the Badlands National Park, Jewel Cave National Monument, Mount Rushmore, and the excellent Custer State Park. We stayed right in Custer and enjoyed down time at a great home VRBO home rental!
A long weekend is perfect for the area and gives you plenty of time to spend in each park. Wind Cave won’t take you all day unless you do some extended hiking, of which there are more than 30 miles of!
…Note: We receive a small commission for purchases made through links in this post.
We spent a great day in the Badlands on a long-weekend trip from Minneapolis! Here’s how to spend a memorable day in the Badlands – tips for those of you who are just driving through or ideas for spending a bit more time. Our first stop wasn’t even in the park, but rather in the adjacent Minuteman Missile National Historic Site, which is worth stopping into to learn about these important assets during the Cold War.
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Congaree National Park is fairly small with one main attraction – the swamp – so it is easy to spend a quick day in Congaree on the way to something else. I see why they didn’t name it Congaree Swamp National Park (its prior name was Congaree Swamp National Monument until 2003) as anything with “swamp” in the name brings a certain disdain. But, a little spit and a polish and a swamp transforms into…er, wait, it’s still a swamp…
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In researching what to do in Biscayne National Park, there wasn’t a lot that we felt would work well for our family and the time we had allotted for the park. We eventually settled on a Biscayne boat tour to Boca Chita Key. We took one day to visit Biscayne while in the area visiting Everglades National Park, Marco Island, and Key West. Our rental home in nearby Homestead was the perfect place to see these areas from!
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The Mojave Preserve is a vastly under-appreciated gem of the National Park System in California. We visited on a trip that had us fly into Las Vegas before hitting the Mojave, Sequoia, Kings Canyon, Yosemite, and Death Valley National Parks. We had the best 1 day in the Mojave Preserve by doing some great hikes and appreciating the beauty of the park!
Tucked between I-15 and I-40 and touching the border with Nevada, this huge park (1.6 million acres and the third largest site in the contiguous US) encompasses abandoned mines, lava tubes, sand dunes, train depots, arguably more Joshua Trees than Joshua Tree National Park, mountains, and so much more that we were unable to do it all in a day! What we were able to do was enjoy some beauty and have a good visit as a family. And sweat… So, how do you have your best 1 day in the Mojave Preserve?
…Our pick for the best family tour in Mammoth Cave
Caves are an odd thing but people have been fascinated by these holes in the ground for a very long time. I suppose early on it was for shelter, but more recently the fascination has been the mystery of where they may go, how big they may be, and what is down that next passage.
Mammoth Cave has all of those hallmarks and the superlatives to go with a name like Mammoth. Thankfully Mammoth Cave lives up to its name as it is part of the longest cave system in the world since it is connected to the broader Mammoth-Flint Ridge Cave System of central Kentucky. Imagine 400 miles of known and surveyed passageways – more than two times the size of the next largest cave!
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