several years ago my family took a trip in an rv from our current home (eastern united states) all the way to the grand canyon (far western u.s.), up to yellowstone, and back home. obviously an incredible experience even if it got a little boring at times riding on the road for so many hours. i didn’t have inat at the time and as such have precious few observations of anything from that entire trip even though i saw awesome species and so many things i could never see in the eastern bit of the country. one day i hope to return to the grand canyon, or at least go to the southwestern u.s., and spend lots of time looking for cactuses and snakes and beetles and things!
overall dreams:
it’d be so sick to one day see every species of new world vulture. it’s a doable task but would take a fair bit of travelling!
papua new guinea. absolute dream destination, so many incredible species, incredible cultural diversity as well. but not necessarily the safest place to visit so i am hesitant to ever properly plan a trip. maybe one day!
Wow! Annobón sounds remote, I would love to go there. Nothing is better than being in the middle of nowhere Inatting, it is like my dream. Lol! Also I agree the everglades (especially the remote parts) is a goal of mine.
I have been to virginia, minnesota, and connecticut before but didn’t have Inat and was too young. I get upset thinking about all the things I missed such as the birds at Indiana Dunes. :(
Same, I’d love to see what western WA looked like back in, say, the 1700s. Much of the lowlands were either prairie, flood plains, or old growth forests. I would love to know how widely distributed many species were back then that are no longer found here. I also wonder what the south sound looked like maybe 600 years ago, before the last major eruption of Mt. Rainier.
Even now much of the Cascades are either hard to access or inaccessible, period. I’d love to study how Spotted Owls, flying squirrels, etc are faring in areas where we can’t easily walk.
I thought about another thing, to drive car from here to the southest point of Dagestan, thing is many regions on the way would be those where observations are pretty low and located near big rivers, I don’t want to visit those places just to add more obs between others, but a vacation away from water in a hot place doesn’t sound fun too, so having a car and being able to drive it around is a dream that is unlikely to happen any soon, with that also goes visiting all the parts of the east of Leningrad Oblast where I’ve never been as far as I remember, and visit most of remote villages there which is unreal without your own car, finding a taxi there to come back would be impossible.
California has a bunch of islands off the coast and unfortunately a lot of them are inaccessible unless you’re a researcher. Two are owned by the military and off limits, the Coronado islands just over the border in Mexico are off limits to visitors, the Farallon islands are off limits to visitors, and Santa Barbara island is technically open to the public but if you don’t own a boat, you can’t go because the dock has been broken for 6 years and after this winter’s storms is now even more broken. I guess the national park service doesn’t have the money cause they haven’t attempted a repair.
Lots of endemic plants and a giant night lizard are just totally off limits and it sucks.
In my final year of seminary my then fiancé (now wife) and I got to travel from the UK to Oahu, Hawaii for a 6-week work placement (2011). I didn’t know about iNat at the time and we have no photos of the things we saw there (humpback whales; leather back turtles!). We talk and dream about going back ‘one day’ but truthfully I suspect it won’t happen.
In a similar vein I took a couple of trips to rural Ukraine (~2013/14) as part of a pastoral team for a small medical aid charity. I saw tons of cools insects there, but back then I’d record all my obvs in a notebook. Unlikely, i’lll return to that part of the country any time soon.
Still I was fortunate to holiday in Mauritius a few months back. I blitzed the resort and beach for observations like it was going out of fashion!
Apart from areas affected by war and conflict, and of course the deep sea and hydrothermal systems, I think sometimes of all those islands owned by the super rich or the military. How many undescribed, short-range endemics must be lurking around multimillion dollar mansions and missile facilities…
I have for many years wanted to drive the Dempster Highway to Inuvik, on the MacKenzie River delta, then onward to Tuktoyaktuk on the Arctic coast. The wild and crazy version of that trip involves a flight over to Banks Island to canoe the Thomsen River, the most northern navigable river in Canada.
My 70th birthday is months away now, not years, so it’s going to have to happen soon.
Likewise, the Australian military has allowed BushBlitz onto its training areas before, but presumably when there is nothing of defense importance working in there at the time.
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