Forty-four! That is the number of National Park official sites I hope to visit in two weeks on my 14th trip.
It’s not as daunting as it might seem. This trip leads me to Washington D.C. and the surrounding area. Originally I had planned two separate trips to the area as there are 23 sites alone in the “Capital Region”, one of nine regions used by the Park Passport program. There are several additional sites in a one-hundred-mile radius in Virginia and Maryland that easily could constitute a trip of their own.
However, once I started planning, I realized that most of the official sites inside Washington were both small and close together. It seems almost every monument, memorial, statue and sidewalk crack inside the city qualified as an official site and I determined that in one day, walking around the National Mall area for under five miles, I could visit 11 sites. A second such day brought in 8 more sites.
Then I included several city-like parks that, in any other city, would simply be “local parks”. In Washington, though, they are part of the National Park Service. Many of these have no “special” features and are just places for a picnic or to enjoy some nature inside an urban area. I can visit 4-5 by car in a day.
The remaining sites will be more traditional National Park sites, limiting me to one or two per day. There are several Civil War battlefields in Virginia, the Revolutionary War site at Yorktown, and the first British settlement at Jamestown for the historical side of the trip. A trip across the 17.5-mile Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel brings my onto the DelMarVa peninsula and the Assateague National Seashore, known for its wild horse population.
Homes of Harriett Tubman and Clara Barton join the Potomac Heritage Trail and C&O Canal to round out the trip. After visiting so many sites, I’ll hop on the Amtrak AutoTrain for the return trip to Florida, letting someone else do the driving.
