from rscottjones

This is Dennis.

I don’t actually know his last name. We’re just casual pub friends, a fellow regular I randomly met at the local bar I’d wheel my dad over to in his final years. Unlike many of the other regulars there, whose daily routine just about every day is to drink crappy beer and talk sports and politics, Dennis is quite the outlier.

First, he’s there much less frequently, and doesn’t drink a ton of beer, and he doesn’t endlessly debate the sports story of the day. Also, he often orders a salad—a salad!—which seems rare at a place that’s literally named Cold Beers and Cheeseburgers. That’s probably because, unlike the others, he has a big goal he’s been working towards.

When we run into each other at the bar every week or three, we tend to chat about two things: marathons and travel.

You see, Dennis is about to complete his own personal quest to run a marathon in each of the 50 states. Prior to starting this, the only running he had done were some 5- and 10Ks. Oh, and he started this goal at the age of 53. So I think we can all agree that this is an impressive quest to adopt, let alone complete.

Well, Dennis is approaching the finish line. He’ll run in his last state—Connecticut—in May, a mere 153 months after starting.

Congrats Dennis! That next beer is on me.

The annual REI member sale has begun and I’m hoping some of my camping-curious friends get the itch to pick up some gear in preparation for the summer. If you live in Phoenix in particular, there are few better ways to escape the summer heat than heading north on the weekend and setting up a tent amid the cool pines. It’s also a great way to escape the perils of your phone and the ubiquitous political news cycle.

So in that vein, here’s a short list of recommendations to get you started. Note that while these happen to be REI-specific, but there are countless other companies and competing products you can buy (including some much cheaper options). This is just the stuff that I personally own and love enough to recommend. It’s also geared towards in-season car camping use, not backpacking or travel camping, or even dealing with tough weather conditions.

I don’t stay up on the latest gear offerings (and you don’t have to either), but let me know if I can be helpful. Also, there are no affiliate links here.

Sleeping pad

This might be the most important thing to get right—at least it has been for me—so I don’t skimp on comfort. As a result, my wife and I are big fans of the Exped Megamat 10, and that’s what I recommend to others. It’s expensive and bulky, but when you have it dialed in, it’s as comfy as your mattress at home and makes camping so much better. For me, that’s worth the price. Grab a cheap usb-rechargable Flextail pump for convenience.

Sleeping bag

We’re talking car camping here, so that means we don’t need ultra-warm or ultra-light. Instead, we want to optimize for comfort during in-season use. My go-to weekend bag is the REI Hunkerdown 20. It’s a roomy rectangular bag that allows me to stretch out and not feel as confined as in a traditional mummy bag. And the 20º rating is perfect for the camping we tend to do, remaining perfectly snug when a cold morning might bottom out at 40º, but still not so warm that it’s uncomfortably hot in the low 60s. When it’s warmer out, you can unzip the bag from the bottom to stick a leg out or allow some cooler air into the bottom of the bag, or unzip it entirely to use as a blanket.

The oversized, semi-rectangular hood means you can bring an oversized camping pillow or even your own normal pillow from home, and it easily folds away if you don’t want to use it all. The accompanying draft tube for your neck comes in handy when it’s cold, and is especially useful for blocking out the early morning sun when it’s not. This new updated version doesn’t have the short off-side zipper that allows you to unzip enough to fold down the top and stick out both arms, but apparently the synthetic version still does.

The biggest downside of this bag is that it only comes in a left zipper orientation. That’s frustrating because it means that if you and your tent partner both have this bag, you can’t zip them together to make one large one, and you’ll both be “facing” in the same direction, so it’s harder for one person to get in and out, especially in a smaller tent.

Camp pillow

If you’re car camping and don’t have a tight sleeping bag hood, just bring your own pillow from home. Easy peasy and already just what you like. If you want a smaller, dedicated camp pillow, test out as many as you can. The ones we use—Klymit Drift in the large size—aren’t carried at REI anymore, unfortunately, but are still available elsewhere.

Tent

There are probably too many considerations here to give you a “hey, just get this one” recommendation. So go talk to someone at the store about your own needs, or shoot me an email and I’ll help. If you’re camping here in Arizona in reasonable weather, you’ll have plenty of options. If you might face a lot more wind, rain, or even snow, then you’ll want to be more careful in what you select.

My primary advice here is to get something with multiple doors, no matter what style you’re looking at. And also, bigger does not automatically mean better, especially if you want more optionality on exactly where to place the tent once you get to your campsite. Grab some upgraded tent stakes while you’re at it.

Headlamp

You can get by with a standard flashlight, but whew boy are things going to be easier with a headlamp. My personal favorite is a Black Diamond Spot R 400 (here’s my review). We literally own four of these, they’re great! If you want a simpler and dimmer and cheaper version, go with the Astro R 300 instead. Whatever you choose, just make sure you get the “R” version which is rechargeable via micro USB, and always get one that has a lock feature so it doesn’t get accidentally turned on. Cheap headlamps that use AAA or AA batteries suck and they’re a pain to deal with, so just don’t.

Stove + Kitchen

If you’re car camping, you have a ton of flexibility here. The most common solution here is a “green and green:” a Coleman two burner stove that uses the ubiquitous 1-lb propane bottle. Be warned, these things last forever. I haphazardly bought one in college and it’s still running just fine more than two decades later; had I known I’d have this for so long, I probably would have bought a slightly fancier model.

There are also plenty of single burner stoves that sit on top of those same propane canisters, or attach via a small metal hose. Any of these options is just fine—there are countless brands and variations that could work. I’d recommend avoiding the backpacking stoves unless you’re actually backpacking—they are more expensive to buy and operate, and are far less convenient to use, too.

As far as cookware and such goes, unless you have an important need for size and/or portability, you can just use some cheap pots and pans from Ikea or Walmart or wherever instead. Don’t worry about fancy set-ups; keep things cheap and easy to start, or bring what you already have. Do pick up some plastic plates and bowls. About half of our dedicated camp kitchen stuff was acquired at the dollar store.

Oh, and if you don’t want to cook while camping, you don’t have to! Camping does not inherently require preparing an elaborate hot meal, you can just snack or get meals out. That’s fine too. We nearly always default to cooking simple meals, often even preparing something in advance at home that we just reheat at camp.

Cooler

You probably already have a cooler, and it’s probably just fine to use for this too. You don’t need a fancy Yeti, especially when you’re just starting out. After all, how you use your cooler is more important than which cooler you own.

Hiking boots/shoes

If you’re in the market for new shoes to use in the outdoors, REI is a great option due to their tremendously generous return policy (for members, at least, but if you buy anything over $100 you might as well join). If you try out some shoes, even for several outings, you can still return them if they aren’t working out for you. It’s a great way to ensure that you find a pair that works for you, worth paying a few extra bucks for.

We’re a bit behind this year in planning out travel for 2025, as so much of our energy went into planning our recent 100 Day Adventure. Of course, we couldn’t have planned many of these trips prior to leaving, as the reservation periods were not even open to do so. So one of our top priorities upon returning home was to get some trips on the books.

Booked

Here’s what we’ve committed to and have at least partially booked already.

New Mexico

A long weekend drive over to New Mexico, primarily so that Jen can visit Prehistoric Trackways National Monument and Fort Stanton-Snowy River National Conservation Area, two as-yet-unvisited objectives for her Treasured Places quest. We’ll be camping at a new-to-us state park, hitting the Fort Stanton Historic Site, checking out the Cloudcroft area, marking off a couple more breweries in the state, and possibly barreling out to Roswell so Jen can see the kitschy alien stuff.

Northern California

This is a “drive-and-fly” trip, where I leave a few days early and drive our camping stuff up to San Francisco and Jen takes a cheap budget flight up there right after work. It’s one of our travel strategies to help extend Jen’s vacation time, while still allowing us to bring our camping gear and travel cheaply. It needs a better name though…maybe “wheels and wings” or “highways to flyways” or “road and runway” or…

Anyway, we’ll visit a number of family and friends in the Bay Area before meeting up with several friends from the old #ParkChat twitter chat (coming in from New York, Dallas, and LA). We’ll catch a minor league baseball game in Sacramento as a group, which gets one of those friends closer to finishing his own MiLB ballpark quest.

As folks head back, Jen and I will continue north to pick up the last remaining counties I need in the state on my US Counties quest before visiting the recent designated Sáttítla Highlands National Monument (USFS) for our Treasured Places quest. Then it’s up to Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument (BLM/USFS), and over to Oregon Caves National Monument & Preserve, one of the few remaining National Park units Jen needs in the West. She’ll fly out of Medford, and I’ll make my way back to Phoenix.

Southern Idaho

Another long weekend drive-and-fly, this one via Salt Lake City. I’d drive up and grab Jen from the airport. The next day, we’d head west past the Bonneville Salt Flats to the Enola Gay hanger at the historic Wendover Airfield for our Manhattan Project quest, then through northeastern Nevada to pick up some stray counties, camping at a hot springs resort (and yes, we’ll book some time in the pools). Then it’s on to Hagerman Fossil Beds for Jen, then back along the Thousand Springs Scenic Byway to see all the waterfalls, before bouncing up to Craters of the Moon (Jen still needs the attached National Preserve). Then it’s on to see the EBR-1 Reactor before a stop at the Idaho Potato Museum (have you really visited Idaho if you haven’t been to a potato museum?). We’ll stop at Register Rock to see signatures from Oregon Trail emigrants on the drive south to Golden Spike National Historical Park and Spiral Jetty. Jen will fly home from SLC, and I’ll meander my way home via the canyons of central Utah.

Mega-trip to the East

While we were bouncing around rural Africa, we got word that two new national monuments had been designated—which meant that I’m no longer “complete” on my National Park Units quest. So my personal top priority this summer was to get to Pennsylvania (Carlisle Federal Indian Boarding School National Monument) and Maine (Francis Perkins Homestead National Monument) to mark these two new ones off. The original idea was simply to fly into Pittsburgh and out of Boston, which would also allow Jen to grab some other national park units she needs.

Before the designations, we had planned on her working remotely for a week from her parents’ house in Michigan, to get in a family visit while not burning any vacation time. Unfortunately, that’s no longer a viable option. Unfortunately, one of her close family members recently got a tough health diagnosis. So we’ve decided to merge those trips together. But with a bit of a twist—I’m going to drive the whole thing.

So, yep, it’s another drive-and-fly trip. I’ll start a number of days early, filling in some blank spots on my county map in Kansas, visiting family and friends in St Louis and Louisville, and eventually picking up Jen from the airport in Indianapolis. That will give me an opportunity to remedy a longstanding issue I’ve had in my counties quest: I’ve been to Indianapolis before, but I can’t at all recall when or as part of which trip, so my counties map of the state is unreasonably barren.

We’ll drive up to Michigan to visit Jen’s family, and then I’ll leave again and make my way towards Pittsburgh (while marking off Fallen Timbers Battlefield and Fort Miamis National Historic Site, one of the last remaining objectives of my Affiliated Areas of the National Park System quest). A couple days later, Jen will fly over to Pittsburgh, where I will spent the day exploring one the few large cities I haven’t yet visited. From there, we’ll visit park units and friends in Pennsylvania and New York, mark off the one county we still need in Connecticut (we had previously completed it, but then they reorganized their counties and we were suddenly missing one), and get up to Frances Perkins in Maine.

Jen will fly home from Boston, and I’ll start making my way across the country towards home. My general goal is to head down towards North Carolina, where I have family and fiends to visit, and then over through the mountains into Tennessee, then down through a swath of western Alabama I haven’t been to, then follow a backroads route through Austin and home. It’ll be an adventure, and I imagine I’ll plan most of it as I go.

So, why would I drive all the way across the country? Good question. After checking relevant rental car and flight prices and doing some back-of-the-napkin math, it doesn’t look like the cost difference will be very much, at least if I’m able to camp as much as I’d like to. It’ll also allow me to see some folks I wouldn’t have otherwise been able to visit, and also possibly see some less important attractions that we wouldn’t spend Jen’s more limited vacation time to see.

But it’s also a bigger experiment aimed at giving some real world info to help us decide our next vehicle. Should we focus on something that can approximate vanlife? Or should we instead go for something more fuel efficient and resign ourselves to more frequent hotel stays when camping conditions are less ideal? We’ve struggled with this question—and spent lots of time considering all various options during our recent campervan trip around Australia—but a trip like this might give us some useful insights.

That said, it’s a bit of a doozy. And given my historical inclination to take every squiggly road and detour I can find, this one could easily find itself in 10,000-mile territory.

Chuckwalla

The newly designated Chuckwalla National Monument (BLM) has us plotting another weekend trip out to the Cal Desert. Since returning from our 100 Day Adventure, I’ve been furiously refreshing recreation.gov to find a campground cancellation in Joshua Tree we can take advantage of for this trip. Alas, none have quite worked, so I’ve found a relatively obscure county-run backup plan along the Colorado River. Since campsite availability isn’t an issue there, we’ll leave this unscheduled while we get some other things booked, then slot this in whenever it fits best in the next month or so. We’ll hit a few other random deserty things while we’re out there.

Los Angeles

A weekend trip primarily to hang out and catch a Dodgers game with some friends (and to mark off that ballpark for Jen’s often neglected MLB quest). I’ll also finally get to complete the Nixon Presidential Library for my Presidents quest. I’m sure we’ll also mark off another brewery (or two) and another tourist destination that Jen hasn’t been to, like the La Brea Tar Pits or something.

Nevada

Another long weekend drive-and-fly trip, this one in and out of Las Vegas. I’ll drive up early, and Jen will catch a budget flight right after work on Thursday; she’ll fly home Sunday evening while I camp nearby, then make my way home on Monday. In between, we’ll spend most of our time a few hours north of the city, checking out Cathedral Gorge and other nearby state parks and rock art sites. After a couple nights, we’ll dip into Utah and make our way down to the Virgin River Gorge for the night. The following day, we’ll either spend some time at Lake Mead and Valley of Fire State Park, or mark off Sloan Canyon National Conservation Area (which Jen needs).

Weekend camping

We also pulled the trigger on some in-state camping weekends. Nothing fancy, just leaving after work on Friday and returning Sunday afternoon. We have two separate weekends booked at Dead Horse Ranch State Park, which will allow us to visit a couple breweries I’m missing in the Cottonwood/Jerome area; not sure if we’ll keep both reservations, but this gives us some optionality re: weather.

Still plotting

We’re still working out a number of other ideas, some which will come into existence and others that will get kicked to another year in favor of something not on this list. But here’s what we are currently plotting out:

Costa Rica

Our (very tentative) plan was to do Costa Rica later this year, likely in our traditional early December travel window. However, there’s a good 12-day window in the fall that lines up three-day weekends and a holiday with a bye week and away game for ASU (as season ticket holders, the home football schedule often dictates our fall weekends)—which would be significantly cheaper and wouldn’t require more than a few days of vacation time. Definitely something to be investigated. If we stick to December, then this period would be open for another trip, though I’m not sure what would take its place, if anything.

Colorado camping

Last year we did a drive-and-fly trip to Denver to camp in the Rockies and escape the Phoenix heat. We enjoyed it so much that we decided to make it an annual thing. Since then, we had some camping friends move to Denver, so we’re now plotting to do a camping weekend with them. We’re still deciding on which weekend would work best, as our weekend schedules are misaligned. We may shift to a northern Arizona trip with them instead, which would be easier to pull off schedule-wise. If that happens, I’m not sure if we’ll find our own way to Colorado this year or not.

Idaho

Similar to the Coast Rica trip, there’s a chance to pull together a 10-day period during the summer, though we’re not yet sure if we want to spend the vacation time to do so. The idea here is a drive-and-fly trip into Boise, with a focus on exploring the Idaho panhandle (we’ve never been), and probably dipping into Montana. We would pick up some new counties along the way, but this trip is more “escape the heat and go relax in the Northern Rockies” than marking off a list of quest objectives. The deciding factor for taking this trip is how Jen’s vacation time shakes out once we account for everything on our plate.

San Diego

We haven’t been out to San Diego in quite some time, so we’re considering a weekend out there (possibly a drive-and-fly if there’s a great deal to be had). The itinerary would include a visit to see my cousin and his winery, a stop at the San Diego Wild Animal Park (Jen hasn’t been, and now she has a camera to play with), and of course, some highly rated San Diego breweries. There are also a few social media friends out there that we may see.

Horseshoe Bend

We’ve been up to Page a number of times in the last couple years, primarily for two trips out to Rainbow Bridge, but we still need to tackle the overnight kayaking trip down the Colorado through Horseshoe Bend. I’d prefer to do this as a group trip in the fall, so we may punt on this if we can’t get everyone organized.

Backpacking

A few of my friends are backpacking-curious, so I have been thinking about putting together a beginner trip for them. My top target is my favorite place to bring first-timers, but it’s a harder permit to get and I can’t snag it until 13 weeks before what would be a fall trip. So that’s a wait and see.

Organ Pipe Cactus camping

We had a group camping trip booked for a remote campground in this borderlands national monument last November, but had to cancel as we needed that last weekend to prep for our 100 Day Adventure the following week. Hopefully we can get it rescheduled with everyone for later this year.

Grand Canyon camping

There’s been talk with two different sets of friends about doing a weekend trip up to the Canyon, and I imagine one or both of them will happen at some point this summer.

Other weekend camping

We’ll also try to get up to Prescott, Flagstaff, and maybe the Mogollon Rim this summer to escape the heat. I’d like to meet up with some friends at Chiricahua National Monument before it is nonsensically renamed a “National Park,” which will bring crowds of new tourists and overwhelm the sparse infrastructure there. We’ve also been meaning to spend a weekend in Bisbee, though that would probably only happen in the fall if some of our other trips fall through, as nearly all the weekends are already accounted for.

Postponed to next year

Unfortunately, we had a number of trips that we had wanted to take this year that just aren’t viable options anymore, for whatever reason. So these will get kicked to next year.

Vancouver

We had tentative plans for a short trip up to Vancouver and Vancouver Island, with a short jog north into the mountains. But I’m planning on sending my passport abroad for a dual citizenship claim, and so we’ll be unable to travel internationally until it’s returned, the timing of which is a bit unclear. So we’ll hold off on this until next year.

Canadian Rockies

This was what I had hoped to be our big road trip for the year. Unfortunately, a few things got in the way of that. Most importantly, we didn’t have time other than reserve all the campsites that we needed in the popular parks we wanted to visit.

Isle Royale

We have been holding off on this one so that we could join a friend who was planning on completing her “named” National Park quest there. Her plans have been delayed a bit due to some other travel opportunities, so we’ve delayed our visit too. Perhaps next year.

Yellowstone

We’ve talked about getting up to Yellowstone, and visiting friends both there and in nearby Driggs, Idaho, for a few years now. And for whatever reason, the trip just doesn’t come together. This seems like yet another year in which that’s the case.

Black Canyon kayaking

Similarly to Yellowstone, I’ve been talking to friends about organizing a trip for each of the last four or five years. And, sadly, it never quite seems to get scheduled.