What’s your travelosophy? In other words, what’s your philosophy of adventure? How do you structure a trip for maximum enjoyment? There’s no one right answer, and people have been creating different experiences based on their tastes.

I want to delineate two different approaches to a vacation/adventure. See which one appeals to you the most.

The road trip

In this kind of adventure, you travel (generally driving) from place to place. The idea is to see as many different places as possible. And this is really the point – to catch as many of the “sights to see” as you can.

This is often a longer excursion, needing as much as a month or more to fully take advantage of the opportunity. However, I have known of some families who try to do this in a 2-week window. There are obvious disadvantages with such a short time-frame; taking up full days just for driving, for example.

The road trip is ideal for those places where there are many destinations in a relatively small amount of space. The Canyons regions of southern Utah and northern Arizona would be an example. An adventure in this region would allow you to see Grand Canyon, Bryce Canyon, Capitol Reef, Arches, and Canyonlands National Parks (not to mention numerous other national monuments) in a relatively small region. You’ll get lots of stamps in your National Parks Passport book! Keep in mind that spaces, particularly in the American West, are much farther apart than they seem when you look at a map. So don’t overestimate your ability to travel from point A to point B. I once had someone tell me they wanted to take a road trip and see Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon. I pointed out that this would be like taking a day trip from her home in South Florida to Louisville, Kentucky!

The key to a road trip is careful planning of routes and lodging. The problem of an adventure like this is that everyone else is occupying the same roads, restaurants, and campsites! There’s a reason these places are popular. This type of trip may help you check off destinations on your bucket list, but if you’re looking for a peaceful excursion like you see in the car commercials, this probably won’t be the one.

The home base trip

This has become my preferred method of travel. Find a spot that is somewhat central to a desired location and hole up there. We have undertaken adventures like this that have enabled us to see (in different years) Great Smoky Mountains, Yosemite, Rocky Mountain, Grand Teton, Yellowstone, and Shenandoah National Parks, as well as the many outlying areas that aren’t part of the National Park system, but are nevertheless beautiful and engaging.

We are not campers, so our best bet for lodging is to find a good cabin. Vrbo and Airbnb have made this easier and in many cases, provide a more desirable home base. Oftentimes, I want to go and do something that’s not in Carolyn’s wheelhouse. Our cabin for our last trip was a destination unto itself and as such, was a great place for her to hang out while I traipsed about on a hiking or photography excursion.

We have managed to select home bases that are close to, but not within the major national parks. One advantage of this is that we can get to the usual popular sights if we want, but we can also take advantage of the less crowded, but still wonderful places that are on the fringes of the park or outside the park itself. One of my best hikes ever was in a canyon outside of Yosemite on the eastern side of the Sierra Nevada range. There are so many no-name places that elicit the same sense of wonder and awe as the iconic ones in the parks; you just have to get to know the area well.

Speaking of getting to know an area, we were faced with a conscious choice a number of years ago: Do we visit new places, or do we return to familiar destinations for a deeper dive? At the time, we had made several trips to western North Carolina (before we moved there) and one trip to Yosemite and one trip to Rocky Mountain. At this point, we were looking at other national parks to take in. But, there was also this sense that we had only begun to scratch the surface at those visited places. After our trip, I would look at a map and notice another trail we could hike, another sight to see. With several vacations in North Carolina, we knew the advantage to going back to the same location. Eventually, this is what we settled on. We’ve returned to Rocky Mountain once, and Yosemite probably half a dozen times. We’ve been rewarded for that increasing familiarity. It was only when my boss paid for a lodge for our leadership team in Jackson, Wyoming that we diverted to a new destination. Then, the Tetons/Yellowstone became our destination for the next 4 years.

The key to a successful home base trip is lodging. What if you are stuck there (weather, sickness, etc.)? A hotel room is not optimal. At the end of our trip last year in Wyoming, we spent the last full day in a hotel in Jackson. Normally, this wouldn’t have been a problem, but there were issues with going out. First, it was extremely hazy due to wild fires in California, rendering outdoor activity fruitless in terms of seeing grand vistas and potentially harmful due to air quality. Mix that with road construction begun in town that made every street and alleyway a parking lot, and we had a situation where we opted to stay in. It was OK – restful – but not the best.

As I said, finding a good cabin/house that’s a home-away-from-home is ideal. That, or a great campsite. You need a sense that the place where you put up your feet is a destination of itself, a place you like going to. That way, if you have to or want to stay put, you still feel like you’re on an adventure. There are always rest days in a good vacation, and having a homey place provides that rest and rejuvenation. And a place to work on a puzzle.

So, what’s your travelosophy? Have you taken a road trip? Was it enjoyable, or frustrating? How about a home base trip? Was it restful and engaging or boring after awhile? Let me know in the comments. Please like and follow. I don’t always write about travel, but when I do, I like to put up lots of pictures.