Vacation/Travel Supplement

Incredible journey: Family vacation includes nine national parks or monuments

Old Faithful erupts every 60 to 75 minutes and is a spectacular sight that draws thousands of tourists to Yellowstone National Park every year. (Photo by Dave Sechrist)

By Mike Krokos

What started as a simple vacation for Dave Sechrist and his family in the summer of 2005 took on a life of its own.

With apologies to the Energizer Bunny©, the Sechrists starting mapping out their trip and, before they knew it, “just kept going and going and going.”

“It started simple and just grew into a monster,” Sechrist half-jokingly said.

What resulted was a 17-day, 5,686-mile trip where the Sechrist’s 2002 Dodge Durango pulled the family camper through 12 states en route to their vacation destinations.

The family’s initial plan was to visit Mount Rushmore in the Black Hills of South Dakota.

Then Devils Tower and Little Bighorn battlefield monuments in Montana were added to the journey because Sechrist is a “history fanatic” who couldn’t resist including these stops on the trip.

Looking at a map, Sechrist and his family realized that Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks in Wyoming were less than 300 miles from there, so they, too, were added as destinations.

“My wife, Tricia, asked if we would be close to the Grand Canyon, and I said no,” said Sechrist, who is employed as a graphics specialist at The Criterion.

“Then I realized that 650 miles to the Grand Canyon [from Yellowstone] is a darn sight closer than 1,600 miles from Indianapolis, so one more stop!”

Sechrist drives 120 miles each day to work in Indianapolis so he is used to spending time on the road. They are members of St. Paul the Apostle Parish in Greencastle.

When all was said and done, the Sechrist clan’s journey had taken them through parts of Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, South Dakota, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Kansas and Missouri.

Not surprisingly, the family’s list of stops is impressive.

“We visited nine national parks or monuments,” he said. Their vacation took them to Mount Rushmore National Memorial, Wind Cave National Park, Badlands National Park, Devils Tower National Monument, Little Bighorn Battlefield Monument, Yellowstone National Park, Grand Tetons National Park, Bryce Canyon National Park and Grand Canyon National Park.

“Wind Cave [the second longest cave in the world] and Bryce Canyon were accidents,” he noted. “We discovered them along the way, but all the rest was planned.”

Another thing not planned, Sechrist admitted, was the effect the vacation had on him, his wife and their two kids.

“The whole trip was an incredible experience, but Yellowstone towers over the rest because of the range of landscape—the thermal springs, pools and geysers to the canyons and grasslands with an incredible array of wildlife.

“Where else could you see a 2,000-pound bull buffalo walking down the middle of the road?”

Other animal sightings included elk, wolves, bear, bighorn sheep, antelope, eagles and wild burros.

“I wasn’t ready for the enormity of the park,” Sechrist said. “On our second day, we took one of the loops through Yellowstone and drove into the Grand Tetons Park [they’re next to each other] to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, just south of the Grand Tetons, and back to our campsite, and traveled more than 500 miles. Very little of that distance was outside of a national park.”

During their trip, the Sechrists also lived a little history.

“Until we were there at each site, I wasn’t aware of the firsts we were accomplishing,” Sechrist said. “We visited the first national park [Yellowstone], the first national monument [Devils Tower] and the first cave in the world [Wind Cave] designated a national park.”

For families with children considering a similar trip, Sechrist offered the following advice.

“My daughter, Tori, was 13, and my son, Matthew, was 11 [at the time],” he said. “With our two [children], the ages seemed perfect. They were old enough to have the stamina to endure the driving—a DVD player in the rear seat helped—and be totally engaged by everything we saw.

“I’d say younger kids might work, but not much younger,” Sechrist noted.

“If you get much younger, neither the kids nor the parents would survive,” he joked.

Where young and old are concerned, the Sechrists’ 2005 family vacation left a lasting imprint.

“My kids still talk about this trip,” Sechrist said. “God has certainly blessed this country!” †