2 weeks, 11 national parks, 3,350 miles: Savor the Southwest on the Grand Circle road trip
LOS ANGELES — There are 63 national parks in the United States, but at the start of 2023, I'd made it to only one.
So when my partner, Reanna, bought us tickets to see Big Thief and Lucinda Williams at Colorado's Red Rocks Amphitheatre, we had an exciting (though surely unoriginal) idea: What if we made it a road trip?
As I began researching the best routes from Los Angeles to Denver, I found variations of what's been called the Grand Circle road trip, a loop of national parks that typically spans Utah, Colorado and Arizona. It's popular for its efficiency: If you plan well, you can hit the Southwest marvels of Zion, Mesa Verde and the Grand Canyon in about two weeks. Because we'd be driving through California regardless, our own Grand Circle route expanded into an oblong shape — not quite an oval, but perhaps a seal balancing a ball on its nose.
Over the course of 12 days, we were able to fit in nearly a dozen national parks, 3,350 miles of driving, thousands of photos and a shameful amount of roadside hamburgers. (For scale, that distance is similar to driving from L.A.'s Santa Monica Pier to the easternmost point of the contiguous U.S. in Lubec, Maine.)
We would've happily spent an extra day in each place to break up the driving, as the quick pace of our trip made us feel absolutely loopy during the last few days when we spent hours in the car forcibly listening to every radio station play the Luke Combs version of Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car."
This is an exhaustive recap of our 300-or-so hours on the road, chock-full of small joys, roadside eats and things we should've planned better.
To make your own trip as smooth as possible, here are a few crucial tips:
—Buy the America the Beautiful National Park Pass. It costs $80 for the year, and visiting all these national parks would've cost us $325 in individual fees.
—Write down essential addresses in advance. Some of these roads (and nearly all of these national parks) have spotty cell service, and you can't ask for directions if you don't know where you're going.
—Bring along a cooler and (at least) one case of bottled water. Hopefully you're not doing this trip during the peak of summer heat like we did, but it's vital to have extra water with you in the more remote areas of this trip.
Off to a rocky start
After loading up my car and filling the gas tank, we found ourselves waiting for a tow truck by the Getty Center, just seven miles into our ambitious journey.
My beloved car Marshmallow had broken down on I-405, and though that would've sucked on a normal day, it was especially upsetting at the start of a huge road trip. But after crying, calling AAA, my mechanic and my editor, and then looking up rental cars with the help, we decided it was too late to call it quits.
