I’m off this morning on another road trip adventure, this time heading north towards Utah and Idaho.

Yes, I know…yet another trip.

Many casual acquaintances don’t understand how we can travel as often as we do. They think we either have massive amounts of time off, or are quite rich. Sadly, neither is true. Trust me, we wish it were—we’d travel even more if we could.

However, we have optimized as much as possible given our own life situation. And tomorrow’s trip leans heavily into one of those optimization strategizes.

And as a result, the trip requires no time off, and it’s cheap enough that we’ll pay for it as part of our every day “discretionary” spending budget. Let me explain:

This will be a “drive ahead” trip, wherein I leave a day or two early and drive all of our camping stuff towards our destination. And then Jen flies in, right after work, on a cheap flight. I pick her up, we do the stuff we want to do over the course of her time off. Eventually, I deposit her at an airport (sometimes the same one, sometimes a different one), she flies back, and I make my own way back.

  • Side note: I need a better name for these trips: Wheels then wings? Freeway before flight path? Roadway to runway? Tires and tarmac? Look, someone help me out with a good suggestion.

While it’s great to avoid spending a bunch of her time off just driving to the area we want to explore, this strategy really shines when we can line up 3-4 days off, like this weekend. She’s flying out on Wednesday night, right after work. Thursday is Juneteenth (a federal holiday), and Friday is her “alternative work schedule” day off (she works an extra 30 mins longer each day in order to get every 10th day off). And she gets the weekend off. She’ll fly home late on Sunday night, and head back to work on Monday morning. I’ll make my way home by Tuesday afternoon, or perhaps Monday night if I hurry.

So on a trip like this, she gets to explore northern Utah and southern Idaho for four full days while taking zero hours of vacation time, and doing so relatively cheaply. After all, this strategy means we’re not paying for two flights (each of which would be more expensive because we’d have to pay for a carry-on), plus hotels, plus rental cars, plus more meals out (camping really is an amazing travel hack).

Instead, we’re driving our own vehicle, camping for cheap, snacking out of the cooler, and only paying for a single ticket on a budget airline, since all Jen needs to bring is her wallet and herself. We leverage my time freedom and willingness to drive long distances and camp so that we can travel, frequently, without dipping into her vacation time, or often even our travel fund.

So that’s why you’ll often see us bombing out to adjacent states once or twice a month.

The rough plan for this trip

Ok, so that’s how we manage trips like this. But where are we actually going, and why, you ask?

Well, I’m on my way north to a campsite booked at Bryce Canyon National Park. I haven’t been there in a while, and it’s much, much cooler than Phoenix right now (or the central Utah deserts for that matter). On Wednesday, I’ll meander my way up to Salt Lake City, via a random county I need for my visit-every-county quest, and will meet up with a social media friend I haven’t met in person yet for happy hour. Jen will arrive around dinnertime, and in the one exception of the trip, we’re staying in a nearby hotel (we have a four free hotel night stays that expire this summer, so it made sense to use one of them here).

On Thursday, we’ll head west past the Bonneville Salt Flats to Wendover Air Field to visit the Enola Gay Hanger (as part of our Manhattan Project quest). From there, we cross into Nevada (within the weird time zone carve-out for West Wendover), then make our way north through a few Nevada counties Jen needs, ending at a hot springs resort, where we’ll camp and soak (ok, “resort” might be overselling the place).

On Friday, we’ll visit Hagerman Fossil Beds National Monument, and drive the Thousand Springs Scenic Byway, stopping at a number of the waterfalls (and marking off an Idaho state park for Jen). We’ll stop into the Silver Creek Preserve, one of the earliest and most successful private easement preserves and riparian restoration projects in the country. From there, we’ll poke into the BLM-managed portion of Craters of the Moon National Monument, on our way to Arco.

On Saturday, we’ll tour the EBR-1 Reactor (officially the Experimental Breeder Reactor-I), the first power plant to produce electricity using atomic energy. We’ll likely stop by some other local attractions—I mean, you sorta have to visit the Idaho Potato Museum if it’s close by, right?—before camping near City of Rocks.

On Sunday, we’ll cross back into Utah, visiting Golden Spike National Historical Park, the spot where the first transcontinental railroad was completed. We’ll also pop by Spiral Jetty, which has been on my list for a number of years. We’ll probably stop at an SLC-area brewery for a beverage and dinner before Jen flies home. I’ll camp in the nearby Wasatch Mountains, before starting my journey home.

I’ll plan my path as I go, but I’m hoping to camp near the North Rim of the Grand Canyon on Monday night, after having explored some Utah spots along the way. I expect to arrive home on Tuesday afternoon.

It’s not a fancy trip, but I’m looking forward to it. We originally planned most of this trip back in 2019, but had to cancel—and we’re just now getting back to it. But we’ll mark off two more national park units for Jen, a couple of Manhattan Project quest objectives for both of us, a Treasured Places area for Jen, and a number of counties for her (and one for me). And, of course, we’ll explore some other interesting spots while avoiding the Phoenix summer heat. Should be fun!