National Park Travels: Trips and Groups

Groups? Trips?

What are these? What is the difference?

One of my first tasks in preparing to visit the entire NPS System was creating reasonably sized "groups" from the list of 425 park sites.

A "group" is simply a collection of generally 12-17 park units that I felt could be visited in one trip. These will eventually turn into trips on some future date.
A "trip" is an actual journey taken to visit those parks in a group.

Currently, I have organized all of the 425 parks into 29 groups. However, trips only exist for those groups that have actually been visited to date.

Below on the left you will find a list of all of the groups. Click on a line to see a brief summary about the group and a list of included sites.

Below on the right is the list of all of the trips I've already taken. Click on a line to see the sites that were part of the trip.

A FEW NOTES:

Group contents can be a bit dynamic. I made many changes to the groups during the first several months of planning, especially after taking a few trips and learning some things. At one time I had as many as 38 groups defined but have whittled it down to 29. I expect it will remain fairly stable going forward.
Trip 1/Group 1 were special exceptions. Most groups contain parks in the same general area. Not this one. In August 2021, just a couple of weeks after retiring, I drove to Iowa to help my daughter move back into a college dorm. On my drive back to Florida, I visited six sites across Iowa, Ohio, West Virginia and South Carolina. These were visited before much of my other ground work was done, so they are not really in a reasonable grouping. They were simply "on the way".
Apart from that first group/trip, groups are numbered from 2 up, starting in the northeast and working westward. Trips are number sequentially in the order taken. There is no direct relationship between a group number and trip number.

The dots on this map show all 425 NPS units. The colors show nine the NPS Passport Regions.

Groups

The list below shows the current groups I have created, along with a brief description of what area of the country they primarily cover. Choose any group to see the specific park units in it, along with links to information on each park.

To see all of the park units color-coded by group, you can create and download a Google Earth KML file.

* indicates that this group has been visited. See table to the right.

Trips

The list below shows actual trips taken, along with a brief comment about the trip.

Choose any trip for more information about the sites visited on that trip, along with links to a detailed page on each park.

As future trips are completed, this list will grow until (hopefully) it one day equals the list on the left.