I’m just starting to plan an extended road trip from home (RI) down to Florida in a few months (end of June) focusing on activating at least one park in each state (and DC). I’m also going to try to do a 10 park rove on one of the days.
What do folks use to plan park activations and roves for places that you can’t easily scope out? How do you select which parks are good choices?
Thinking things like:
close enough to the route
good spots to activate from
2-fer/3-fer/etc opportunities
camping spots available (I’ll be camping every other day)
I am planning on using ChatGPT / Claude for a lot of it, but AI isn’t always the best for knowing where is best, so figured I’d ask the group.
https://potamap.us is my preferred map, since it shows park boundaries for many areas (not all).
https://pota.review has reviews of some parks. It also has a good map; no boundaries, but it can show which parks you’ve already activated (using the “export csv” file from the top right corner of https://pota.app/#/user/stats)
Since what you’re planning is a roadtrip with POTA added, start with your general route and use these maps to find parks near your route might be the best approach.
If you were planning a POTA-specific rove, I’d start with the maps, looking for areas with high park density, and figure out a plan from there.
Don’t trust the AI’s- one just sent me to a train station where no trains stop on weekends. It’s Saturday. I second the Pota map thing. Lots of places look like POTA parks and are not. Virginia Wildlife Management Areas used to qualify but as of January they don’t.