When my Grandma Joy and I set out to visit all 63 U.S. National Parks, we never imagined the journey would lead us here.
Over seven and a half years, we traveled more than 100,000 miles together, reaching every U.S. state except Rhode Island and Nebraska, along with Washington, D.C., the U.S. Virgin Islands, and American Samoa. What began in 2015 as a single trip to Great Smoky Mountains National Park—because my grandmother, then 85, had never seen a mountain—became a history-making quest across America’s most sacred landscapes.
In May 2023, Grandma Joy reached the finish line at the National Park of American Samoa and became the oldest person in the world to visit all 63 U.S. National Parks. She got her first passport at age 91. Not exactly the typical life trajectory for most travelers. But Grandma Joy’s Road Trip has never been about social conformity.
Since then, she has visited 11 countries and five of seven continents. Later this year, we plan to complete our seven-continent goal with trips to Thailand and Australia. But first, we are hitting the reset button for a new kind of journey: an unprecedented 50-state book tour in pursuit of healing, hope, and human connection. We're calling this tour "Healing Across America."
My memoir about our travels was released on June 16. Since then, we have already made bookstore appearances in five states: Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, and Pennsylvania. By the end of July, we will have checked 15 more states, plus Washington, D.C. off our list.
This is not how book tours are typically done. Then again, setting out to visit every national park with an 85-year-old grandmother was not typical either.
So why all 50 states? Because the need for healing is universal.
People are hurting. Families are fractured. Loneliness has become its own kind of epidemic. Our country feels more divided than ever, but that is not the America Grandma Joy and I came to know on the road. It is not the America we found in our national parks, or around the dinner tables of strangers who welcomed us into their homes in South Dakota, Arkansas, Virginia, California, Oregon, Hawaiʻi, Alaska, and Texas.
Again and again, we met people who were kinder, more generous, and more multidimensional than the categories we are so often corralled into. We met people who reminded us that our better angels are still out there, still fighting to uplift us.
That is why this tour matters to us.
Our story is not about checking national parks off a list. It is the deeper story beneath the adventure: a story of estrangement and reconciliation, aging and possibility, loneliness and belonging, family trauma and forgiveness. Traveling to all 63 U.S. National Parks was one healing journey. Writing the book became another. Now, delivering our story to readers in all 50 states is the next chapter in the never-ending healing journey of life.
I suspect this journey may be the most healing of all, because the greatest healing happens in communion.
Our intention is to spark a national conversation about healing: personal healing, familial healing, and yes, societal healing. Our public lands are under threat, and if we want these sacred places—and the species that inhabit them—to be conserved for future generations, we have to find our way back to one another. Across the dividing lines. Across the old wounds. Across the stories we think we already know about each other.
Grandma Joy and I believe most people want this country to be kinder. We believe most people want to leave something beautiful behind.
Dolly Parton once offered a piece of wisdom that has become a kind of compass for us: “Find the good in everybody.” That is what we are trying to do on this tour. State by state. Bookstore by bookstore. Conversation by conversation.
No matter where we go, we will be reminding readers that healing is not a destination. It is a lifelong journey. There is no finish line.
We are all in need of healing. We all have a story to tell. And maybe the first step toward finding our way back to one another is simple: look another human being in the eyes, tell the truth about where you have been, and listen when they tell you where they have been too.
