Hi, I'm Lale Arakoglu, and great to have you along for another journey with women who travel.

If you're lucky, you've gotten to experience some of the natural beauty found across America's 63 national parks.

Home to places like Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon and Acadia, Maine.

But few people have got to see as much of them as today's guest, Emily Pennington,

a regular Condonast Traveller contributor, an author who set herself a task at the start of 2020 that was, well, quite daunting.

I had this kind of big, unruly project that I gifted myself of visiting every single

U.S. National Park in a year. And as you can imagine, the American landscape is as diverse as humanity in Americans themselves.

In her memoir, Ferrell, losing myself and finding my way in America's national parks,

which came out this past February, Emily describes how her painstakingly planned Odyssey was hit with a curveball

when COVID hit. Suddenly, she found herself grounded and then, needing to be open to spontaneity,

changing her route constantly as things fell through. Basically, what happened was parks that I was

going to spend a week in, or weeks that I was going to have kind of a week off to mess around in Utah and just rest or write or do something not in a national park, you know, like go rock climbing.

There were all these things that I wanted to do that were side trips that basically got axed immediately.

And then things like Alaska had to get planned and replaned and canceled and

re-planned about three or four different times.

A keen solo traveler, Emily did chunks of the trip alone.

But she was also joined by her partner of two years, Adam, for portions of time.

When you're thrown together in a tiny, you know, metal box on the road with someone for months

at a time without, you know, getting to go work in a coffee shop or go to a store by yourself

and kind of get some space from the other person. COVID was really difficult for most people that I

know who are in romantic relationships. I think that one of the most challenging things about

long-term relationships is the fact that humans are not a point on a map, you know,

...