Welcome to Exploring with The Phems! We’re dedicated to giving you the very best in travel tips, exciting itineraries and ways to navigate the National Park system.

My husband and I have taken our family on many vacations over the years, concentrating on the beauty of the United States and its National Parks. My husband is really the planner (and history buff) and loves to find off the beaten path historical places and out of the ordinary accommodations. Our children claim we always take them to haunted lodgings. We retired in January of 2020 and we were planning on making travel a priority and had several trips planned both in the US and in Europe. But, we all know what happened to travel in the year 2020! When travel became possible again, we decided to stay closer to home and take advantage of our beautiful National Parks. Now that the world has opened up again, we are exploring places on our bucket list.

After we had several people ask if we could give them suggestions on some places to visit and on some of our itineraries from our previous trips, I decided I would start this blog so all of the information would be in one spot for our friends and family.