Monkey See Monkey Travel

Our next park destination was a joy to experience. The entire Natchez Trace Parkway runs from Nashville in Tennessee through Alabama and into Mississippi to its terminus in Natchez. We picked up the parkway a little more than a third…

We arrived in Memphis after dark and checked into what, on Google Street View during the day, looked like a decent hotel in a decent neighborhood. It was, after all, just down the street from Graceland, and certainly The King…

We wondered whether we should backtrack from Memphis to pick up Hot Springs National Park, but we were so glad we did. Not having read anything about the park’s history beforehand, I admit to thinking of Hot Springs as little…

(That’s Mexican lingo for “How cool!”) Chasing the sun, we opted to drive south from Austin to Padre Island National Seashore (not on our original list of parks) instead of heading north to Chickasaw National Recreation Area in Oklahoma in…

Needing a few city days after our trip to Big Bend, we arrived in San Antonio at our motel on the non-touristy side of I-35 (meaning cheap room rates but kind of sketchy with a lot of vagrants milling about)…

We survived our first national park foray of Project 100 with four days in Texas’ Big Bend National Park, which had cold-weather forecasts making us nervous before we left Phoenix (more on that at the end of this post). We spent most of…

After a final few days of frantic packing and preparations, Project 100 has officially launched! We loaded up the car this morning (can you believe all this stuff fit neatly into the Prius?) and headed east from Phoenix. It wasn’t until…