Wandering Money Pig - A journey of early retirement and FIRE (financial independence retire early)

  Arches National Park, Utah Wallace Stegner:  “National parks are the best idea we ever had.  Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst.” When my wife and I were planning our cross country road trip going from North Carolina to California , visiting various national parks was our absolute number one priority.  Thanks to so many great national parks in the United States though, we really had a difficult time figuring out which ones to visit. Our trip would be in the winter months (November 28-February 9), so we eliminated national parks that are on the northern half of the country.  Those would include places like Yellowstone, Glacial, Yosemite National Parks . The reasons for skipping those parks on the northern half of the country were two:  1) we did not want to hit inclement weather like snow and freezing rain and 2) we did not want to hike/sightsee in really cold weather.  We planned on visiting those parks in our near future,

  Mesa Arch, Canyonlands National Park, Utah Prior to planning our (my wife and I) cross country road trip, we wanted to really focus on national parks and national monuments along the way.  Our trip would take us from North Carolina to California, and as you can imagine, mapping all these national parks/monuments was a monumental challenge.   In our planning, we knew we would skip Grand Canyon National Park , as we had previously visited it, but we knew we would add Zion National Park , as that was our favorite national park out of all the national parks we had visited.  After visiting the awesome Petrified Forest National Park ,  Meteor Crater Natural Landmark , and Glen Canyon National Recreation Area , up to that point in our current trip, we were ready to visit the famous Utah Big 5 National Parks! On the afternoon of December 27th, we were heading out of Monument Valley in Arizona towards our next destination, in Moab, Utah .   Google Maps showed it would take a little under 3