4 National Parks Over 4 Weeks - From Caribbean to Washington
We can finally unpack, after 6 weeks of travel! As it turned out, we celebrated the 2021 National Park Week with a road trip to Mt Rainier National Park. It’s the 4th national park we have visited for this month and all four of them are unique of a kind.
➡️ Virgin Island National Park, US Virgin Island (1st week of April).
This is the only US national park in the Caribbean. We stayed on St John for a whole week just to explore the park. If you love tropical islands, beaches, snorkeling, coral reefs, as well as mountain landscape, this is a perfect place.
➡️ Everglades National Park, Florida (2nd week of April)
We visited the park twice over the week and still felt just scratched the surface. The park is huge - ranking 10th in size among US national parks. In case you don’t know, 7 out of the the largest 10 US nationals parks are located in Alaska.
If you like to see alligators, all kinds of birds, manatees, and don’t mind navigating in the swamp, this will be your park.
As a tip, you’ll find just as many, if not more, alligators, in the neighboring Big Cypress Preserve. We saw hundreds in the scenic Loop Road drive off Tamiami Trail alone, much more than we saw in Everglades.
This is the first US national park I’ve visited. A revisit with my family after 20+ years makes the trip even more special.
➡️ Biscayne National Park, Florida (2nd week of April)
If you have already visited the Caribbean islands, it’s probably not that special. Nevertheless, 95% of the park is in the water, making it the largest marine sanctuary among all US national parks. If you are in Miami and wouldn’t mind a quiet day less than 1 hour away, this could be a good choice.
➡️ Mt Rainier National Park, Washington (3rd/4th week of April)
A spontaneous road trip after we scrambled to fly back from Miami in the last minute due to island lock down in the Caribbean. As it was “spontaneous”, we didn’t do any research other than booking our lodging in the park and an Airbnb outside. We didn’t know the park was mostly closed until we arrived!
Nevertheless, we enjoyed a variety of scenes ranging from forest, snow, volcano to waterfalls, and on average hiked twice with our kids every day.
Anyway, if you are into landscape, gorgeous snow scenes, skiing or snow trekking, a bit of solitude, come visit Mt Rainier during the off season before May (or even June).
We had a number of hiccups this trip, including the most recent one in Mt Rainier just a few days ago. Our 3 year old had an accident fall while throwing rocks at the river bank (images above). We ended up spending 6 hours at an ER one hour drive away. Fortunately, there was no deeper injury on his head beyond the cut. We even took him to revisit the bloody rock the 2nd day and taught him how to be more alert with environment.
Now we know what to expect this summer, and can’t wait to see the rest of the Mt Rainier when it opens up.
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