By Nathan Pilling

Kitsap Sun

HANSVILLE — Mikah Meyer has seen 188 National Park Service units over the last 14 months. In his white cargo van — which he’s lovingly titled “Vanny McVanface” — he’s driven about 27,000 miles, spent countless nights sleeping in parking lots and cruised through dozens of states.

Sitting Friday in a friend’s home in Hansville, gearing up for a visit to Olympic National Park, the Nebraska native is a little over a third of his way through the journey of a lifetime.

“It is a road trip on crack,” Meyer said.

A little over a year ago, Meyer launched a massive quest to visit each of the more than 400 U.S. National Park Service “units” — a term that covers national parks and other areas managed by the parks service, ranging from monuments to seashores to the White House.

Since then, he’s been snaking his way through the country, hitting the highlights at each site along his carefully planned route, sharing his journey online and crashing into bed in the back of his van.

By time he’s finished, he’ll have hit units in every state, plus Washington, D.C., Guam, American Samoa, the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico. If he completes his journey as scheduled, he’ll be the youngest person to have visited all of the units and will be the first person to have seen them all in one continuous trip, Meyer said.

“It takes non-stop energy and engagement to pull it off,” he said. “It’s a huge project that probably should have a team of 5-10 people working on it, and I’m doing it all myself.”

When he began his journey, he had 411 locations to visit. Since then, a handful of locations have been added to the national registry, so at the moment, his goal stands at 417. Meyer hopes to hit that last one in 2019, exactly three years after he began on the 11th anniversary of his father’s death.

Faced with his own mortality after his father’s death at 58 following a battle with esophageal cancer, Meyer decided to go after a dream, a big one, the kind that most don’t consider until retirement.

“My dad had all these goals for his retirement and his life, looking decades ahead of time,” Meyer said. “And a lot of those he didn’t get to do. All of us, no matter who we are, you could get hit by a truck tomorrow, you could die from cancer, it doesn’t matter if you’re 18 or 30 or 50.”

And so after some planning, he hopped in the van and began to drive.

Contrary to popular belief, he said, he’s not a trust fund kid and he’s not leeching off his family to make this journey happen. He earned the money for the trip by working in his 20s and the rest is coming from contributions and sponsorships.

“I’m exhausting my savings account,” he said. “I joke and say this better turn into a job somehow, because I’ll be broke at the end.”

Meyer sees the trip as a platform for what he’d like to do after April 2019, to be a role model as a member of the LGBT community in the outdoors world.

“I realized pretty early on this journey, the opportunity I had to be that example that doesn’t exist, to be that role model that doesn’t exist,” he said. “Ideally what I’d like to do is to keep using that and maybe be that first mainstream travel show host who happens to be gay.”

To follow Meyer’s journey, visit tbcmikah.com.