Labor Day Weekend is coming up and it’s a perfect time to plan your next road trip to one of our country’s National Parks! But with 60 National Parks and 417 National Park units in total, how can you find the closest one? Here are 3 great FREE resources to help you find your next National Park adventure!
Voronoi Map Showing the Closest National Park
A Voronoi diagram “is a partitioning of a plane into regions based on distance to points in a specific subset of the plane.” In other words, a cool diagram showing you the closest National Park to where you are. So for our family, who lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, the closest National Park to us based on this diagram is Congaree National Park. While this may just be a mathematical plotting of distances with little regard to actual driving time, it is still a pretty cool map to see and quickly get a layout of how National parks are dispersed across the country.
Find your park here: Voronoi Diagram of National Parks!
The Explore Parks Map from the National Park Foundation
There are over 400 units of the National Park Service but only 60 of them are considered National Parks. For a full list of the many different types of Official National Park units visit this page. When planning our family’s next adventure I typically center my planning around visiting a specific National Park from the list of 60. The best way to do that is to use this map and feature on the National Park Foundation website. You can search by park name, a region of the country, or state.
Find your park here: https://www.nationalparks.org/explore-parks/all-parks!
The National Park Service Find Your Park Page
Once I have identified the National Park we want to visit, I start familiarizing myself with the other National Park units that are nearby. The National Park Service offers a very nice page on their website that allows you to quickly and easily search National Park units by state. There are over 400 National Park units in the country and the odds are there is one near the National Park you are visiting.
When we visited the Great Smoky Mountains National Park last year we discovered the Andrew Johnson National Historic Site was less than an hour away! And earlier the year we visited Everglades National Park we discovered we would be driving right past Canaveral National Seashore on the way home.
Find your park here: https://www.nps.gov/findapark/index.htm!
Thanks for following our family’s adventures!
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Gregory Ng
GOAL: Visit 100 National Parks as a family by 2020. Favorite Parks: Zion National Park, Mt Rainier National Park, Valley Forge National Historical Park
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