How did we come to this decision? It wasn’t easy. With one park down and 62 to go, there were so many potential next choices! So many questions! Where should I go next?? When? With whom? HOW DO I DECIDE?!?!?

Since I went to Shenandoah in the fall, and because I work full-time, the next possible window of opportunity was around the end of the year and/or the holidays. I gave that some brief consideration and quickly I remembered that I have 3 young adult children, and that with two of them in college and one in her fledgling year of full-time employment, the scheduling considerations were overwhelming. When all was said and done, we were only able to arrange a few days together as a family, and we agreed it was best for everyone to just stay home. We did. It was great.

Next up: Spring Break. Again – trying to line up the academic schedules of two colleges and the school system my husband works for, and my head nearly exploded trying to orchestrate anything. Nothing lined up. No two people in my family were available at the same time. Nothing worked out. So I made the only sane choice – abandon the children and take my husband on the first vacation the two of us have been on solo in at least a decade. And that answered the questions of Who and When.

The next and possibly most important question was where. Again – so many options. We are talking late March, typical school Spring Break time. That puts Florida out of the running. March is also not a great time to go to places north, like Acadia or Glacier. For planning, I really like Earth Trekkers’ guide to the National Parks by Season – they have a great breakdown of which parks are great to see in any given month, as well as a breakdown by park of when each park is “best” and when each park is “most populated.” I started there, since I have extremely limited knowledge of any of the parks, and began whittling down the options.

We have a limited amount of time and we really want to go on a vacation vacation as opposed to an outdoor adventure vacation, so I started looking for parks that were in sunny places near fun cities and preferably with direct flights. It turns out there are not a whole lot of places that tick all the boxes, but we’ve never been to Las Vegas (together, anyway… I went once with my mom for a professional conference and my husband has never been). So – couples vacation in Vegas for spring break it is!

Death Valley National Park is about a 2-hour drive from Las Vegas. It’s an enormous park and I’m sure we could happily spend several days if we really wanted to explore, but for our purposes we are only going to go overnight. We’ll leave Vegas in the early afternoon, get to the park early evening, hit up a sunset and some night sky views and call it a day. We can spend as much of the next day exploring the park as we like, and will end up back in Las Vegas before bedtime. Since we are not planning to do any meaningful hiking, but rather seek out the vistas and photo ops from the comfort of the air-conditioned automobile, 24-28 hours in the park should be sufficient. I don’t know a lot about Death Valley but I do know the NPS has a guided audio tour of the filming locations of Star Wars, and for us that is a good enough place to start!

We go in a little more than three weeks. The next few posts will be about planning and preparing, and what I learn along the way. Please share thoughts, insights, and encouragement in the comments!