Happy New Year! Procrastinator that I am, I'm sharing a post I never finished last year. However, it does also serve as an excellent point of reflection over one of our greatest family adventures of 2018... This past June I went on the longest road trip of my life—with my wife, a four-year-old, a three-year-old, a two-year-old, and a one-month-old. We had one reserved destination ~1,800 miles away and zero plans on how to get there. It was National Lampoon’s Vacation minus Wally World and the bb-gun hostage taking.

To backtrack a little, I should explain that this all began when my wife and I sat down to write out some New Year’s goals in 2017 and decided we should write out a “bucket list”. And so, we did—scribbling some prayerful thoughts on a napkin one evening at a noisy restaurant while a baby sitter watched the kids at home. Many line items spewed forth, one of which: the goal to see all the National Parks in the United States.

So, come this past May when we were blessed with our fourth child, Amelie, and a newly implemented eight week paternity leave plan at work, we asked ourselves: what’s one of the furthest parks we could see?

We landed at Acadia National Park in Maine, which is about a 27-hour drive from our home in Louisiana.