Many years ago I was reading “Travels with Charlie” by John Steinbeck. In it, he describes perfectly the draw for the road-tripping some of us live for. The open road and the promise of seeing something new. Sleeping in the car, eating food cooked on the back bumper, brushing your teeth by the side of a dirt road - all of it. Then you get to a place you’ve never been and have to stop and stare at its differentness to anything you’ve seen before. I love that.

Doing wedding and portrait photography doesn’t lend itself to the road trip the way landscape photography does. Of course, in my experience, landscape photography doesn’t lend itself to making as much money as wedding and portrait photography.

A few years ago I did a road trip to Bryce Canyon National Park and then thought about making a side trip to a place I hadn’t been before: Kodachrome Basin State Park. It’s just down the road east of Bryce and heading towards Capitol Reef National Park. It’s at the northern border of what I always think of as Escalante. If you take a left out of the park you hit a dirt road and then you’re in it for real. I was in a little Toyota Matrix and still did the dirt road for a ways. I even took that Matrix on the Hole in the Rock road out of the town of Escalante to go backpacking in Coyote Gulch. Lost a hubcap on the drive, but it made the trip down that horribly washboarded road.

So here’s my main problem with pretty much all national parks. Here it is, I’m going to say something taboo to the true believers: the national park campgrounds suck. Lucky you to have won the impossible lottery for a national park campground spot. You get a patch of dirt to park your car and pitch your tent. What else do you get? Some stinky bathrooms? Rangers hassling you if one of your tires is parked halfway off the asphalt in the dirt of the dirt used by thousands of campers? Yes. This happened to me in the Hoh Rainforest once. You stink and need a shower? Good luck with that. You have electronic devices needing charging? Good luck with that. You want to have some peace and quiet in a campground filled elbow to elbow with your fellow campgrounders? Good luck with that. Rangers shooting beanbags at bears in the middle of the night? Yep, that too. Sometimes they’re the only place you get. Especially if you’re in Yosemite, which has the absolute worst campgrounds of any of the parks. Not only that, but the food in the Lodge is barely edible nowadays. Something to do with Aramark taking over the concessions. But that’s it’s own story.

Luckily at Bryce Canyon, there’s a really quite good campground about a half a mile outside the gates with a big restaurant a little further.