I sleep in Walmart parking lots and hotel parking lots because they’re well-lit, they’re busy, and they usually have security cameras. For the general person, I think it’s about being smart and looking ahead. Because of this, I recognize that I may be in danger in ways that other people aren’t. I’m all over newspapers and all over social media in a country where there are many places that don’t appreciate who I am. “I’m openly gay and trying to help the park service with their outreach to the LGBT community. What to Pack for a Road Trip How do you stay safe? I haven’t been there yet and am monitoring that situation at all times.” Of course, there’s also the fact that Guam might be in danger of a nuclear bomb. There’s another site in the High Sierra of California that only is open from the middle of July to the middle of September and I’ll have to make a special trip for that. After I was in New England, for instance, a new national park site was added in upstate New York, so I have to backtrack for that. There have been a few other things like that where something major has forced me to change my plan. Virgin Islands last year because none of the hotels I stayed at are open now. “I’m really happy I went to Puerto Rico and the U.S. Here my advice would be to plan as much of your itinerary as you can in advance. All the variables are interconnected, like a chess game in that you have to see months ahead.
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I have a spreadsheet on my computer that lays out every day between now and Apevery few days I make alterations and change things. It took me two years to come up with that plan and it changes all the time. Finally, I had to optimize the route to make it efficient so I could save on gas. Next, I took into consideration when parks are open. “Once it became clear I’d be doing the trip in a van and I’d be living in it, I needed to base it around weather and make sure I would be able to spend summers up north and winters down south. How do you go about planning such a long and complicated itinerary? Mikah and Vanny at the New Orleans Jazz National Historic Park. I guess my advice here would be to save aggressively and keep the big picture in mind.” What are your biggest expenses on the road? I credit that job a lot with putting me where I am today. If not for that job, there’s no way I would have had the money to launch this. I saved four years of living expenses by living in a high school dorm. That saved me between $1,000 and $2,000 on rent every month. When I finished grad school, I moved to Washington, D.C., and took a job at a boarding school. It was a decade of passionately and proactively saving money knowing I wanted to do this. When my friends were spending $50 at the bar on Friday nights, I had water. So I aimed to save a lot less and saved my ass off for 10 years. “I knew it would cost me less since I planned to live in a van and eat out of my solar-powered fridge. They were looking at it from a traditional point of view-someone who would drive, stay at hotels, eat out at restaurants, things like that. Tell me if I’m crazy.’ They were the ones who told me it would take about $500,000 to pull this off.
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I reached out to their board when I first thought of doing this and said, ‘Here are my plans. They track people who try to go all of the parks and they’ll give out awards based on how many you’ve been to. “There’s an organization called the National Park Travelers Club. Contributing writer Matt Villano recently caught up with the blogger to get some tips for planning and surviving an extended road trip.
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Meyer reached a major milestone earlier this week when he started the final third of the journey when he wraps up the trip this time next year, he will have logged some 80,000 miles in all. Since then, the 31-year-old blogger and LGBT activist has been going at it nonstop, driving around the country in a converted cargo van and sharing videos along the way. Two years ago, Mikah Meyer set out to become the youngest person to visit all 417 U.S.