WHY WE DON’T VISIT NATIONAL PARKS (road trip to Oregon)

this is something that i was really hoping we were never going to have to talk about but it's something that's gonna affect our travels moving forward enough that i think you should know about it should i tell them about the other unfun thing right now or should we save that oh gosh we're karen nay and in the last four years we've traveled to 100 countries but 2020 brought us back to the u.s where we bought a converted sprinter van that we've been living out of full time for the last three months in our last video we made the six hour drive from colorado to salt lake city utah and today we're continuing our road trip to oregon we still have 700 miles and at least 10 hours of driving ahead of us but the plan is to break it up with some stops along the way so today we're just making the short drive to twin falls i am back in the driver's seat i gained some confidence on the bike trip i'm actually really sad that we're leaving utah today because i was really looking forward to visiting some of the incredible national parks in this state however that's not really an option for us right now and we'll explain why later where are the keys probably nate's [Music] i know the bike drip ended a few weeks ago but i didn't do a very good job closing it out and there's been a lot of questions so what did nate do with his bike i'm never getting on this bike again and i stuck to my word rick helped me sell it a few days later on craigslist and i'm starting to miss it a little bit now but we didn't have a bike carrier for the van and here it doesn't have a bike so what'd you do another bike trail not in 2020 or maybe ever the main reason not because i don't like biking but because it put a lot of pressure and stress on cara both being the only person in the van and having to edit three documentaries back-to-back i think for me it was just that feeling of accomplishment that i had at the end of every single day i feel like that's rare in life that and getting to eat whatever i wanted for 17 days was pretty nice did sarah miss dusty while he was gone hey the internet wants to know if you missed dusty on the bike yes [Music] [Music] you have arrived wow we have been driving through nothing but potato fields for the last hour and this place just came out of [Applause] nowhere it's called shoshone falls and i knew it was a top thing to see here but i didn't realize it was located in a miniature version of the grand canyon with that said the pictures on the internet did have a little more water the internet did not tell me this what is it oh are you serious i literally just listened to a podcast about him this morning this is weird we have to go is it this way i think so an unexpected 45 minute hike later look at this the jump is still here wow evil knievel shot over the snake river canyon at nearly 300 miles per hour but only seconds later knievel's parachute deployed far too early the wind blowing is sky cycle back to the foot of the south canyon wall the attempt had failed but it will forever be cemented in the evil legend and part of the twin falls history okay here we go imagine this up at the top and then you gotta wow so my understanding is one of the reasons that he picked this spot is because it's exactly a mile from here to the other side of the canyon this is one of those things that happened before my time that i've always heard about but i never really knew the details of and i appreciate it so much more standing here right now so i have perfected the one pot oh one pot nachos we have a evil knievel documentary pulled up on the computer and we will see you see you in the morning it's a little spicy morning we spent the night at a hot spring last night but it was closed by the time we got here so [Music] so you can either go in the regular pool it kind of just looks like a public swimming pool where you can pay an extra five dollars to go one of these private rooms which we did just because you know [Applause] oh it's so hot it's hot i'm so yes it is so hard and it's so chilly though it's like the perfect morning to this i know it is [Music] [Applause] [Music] all right we just drove two hours to boise but before we move any further you might remember not too long ago during the bike trip when i said we're being honest i had to spend the last hour in the car making some really unfun phone calls we're gonna explain what those were about now this is something that i was really hoping we were never gonna have to talk about because it was gonna get resolved and it was also something that i didn't want to talk about because i don't know how we can talk about this without just seeming like we're complaining for a really long time but it's something that's going to affect our travels moving forward enough that i think you should know about it earlier this year we climbed long's peak in rocky mountain national park and we also made a video in great sand dues national park so those phone calls were with government officials because someone we don't know who they were anonymous took it upon themselves to report our videos as commercial filming inside of national parks they used our incoming expense reports that we had published for the past four years to show that we were making money from our channel and so the national park service reached out in the middle of the bike trip i woke up to a voicemail saying that we needed to call immediately or we would one get fined and if we didn't call back and pay the fine if we didn't call them back by a specific deadline they were going to put a court order out and then there was going to be a warrant for our arrest it all got really serious really quickly and we have like no service for three days straight so it was a pretty stressful situation in the moment and then what followed was just really disappointing we got fined over a thousand dollars for those videos that we filmed which is definitely a bummer but at the same time it's it's not the money the worst part of the whole thing is in addition to getting fined we are no longer allowed to film in national parks without getting a commercial use permit which sounds really simple but this permit you have to pay to apply again the money's not necessarily the issue but it's 300 and then it's 150 for each day we want to film if you get accepted your application and the permit itself is obviously made for somebody who wants to film a feature length film inside the park because they want to know how many animals we're bringing how much stuff we're going to be blowing up and so i understand that our channel is commercial i'll be the first one to admit that but we also fall in like this gray area where this form and this process is just kind of ridiculous for a youtube channel that's gonna bring a handheld camera into a park and film their experience and encourage other people to go explore these places on top of everything else these forms take two to four weeks just to be reviewed which if you know us we don't even know where we're sleeping tonight that's asking for a lot of pre-planning and on top of that we have to give a detailed report on where we'll be in the park each day exactly what we're doing exactly what we'll be filming we don't know we should never it's not the type of videos we shoot it wouldn't be worth it the rest of our year was gonna be in national park so like even if we were willing to go through that there's just no way that we could do that for the rest of the year i think that's the really frustrating part we kind of like got stuck in colorado for a few months and hung and hung around there doing like the bike trip and stuff but like after that the plan was to go explore all these incredible national parks out west so we're kind of finding ourselves feeling a little lost for what to do next and we knew as we make our way across the western united states if we weren't visiting these incredible places people would be wondering why you know we're driving right past yellowstone and zion and all these places that were on our bucket list and this is why so we're not banned from visiting national parks technically we could go if either we got one of these permits or we could just go and not film but that's also a weird place for us at this point in our lives that just doesn't have a lot of appeal to us and i've been trying to figure out a simple way to explain why and as i was thinking about it on my run yesterday just bought this sharpie at the gas station to do this illustration there's like two things that make us really excited in life right now and those are new travel experiences and then sharing or capturing those experiences and then being able to create a video that we're proud of to share on youtube and all of this space in the middle where these overlap this is what makes us the most happy so we could go to national parks and we could have those new experiences but that would still leave us feeling like something was missing we really feel like most fulfilled when we're capturing it like it adds to our experience at this point so we're trying to get it worked out but it's the government i don't expect that this is gonna get resolved anytime soon so for the foreseeable future we won't be visiting national parks that's the short of this very long story while we're giving you the bad news we might as well go ahead and get it all out of the way whoever took it upon themselves to report us to the national park service also took it upon themselves to report us to the ffa the federal aviation authority so around that same time we also got a phone call from them and our drone flying is now considered commercial drone flying which requires a permit which from what i understand is essentially a test that needs to be taken that's almost equivalent to the same test that pilots have to take you just don't have to do any of the actual flying that's pretty straightforward i just need to carve out quite a bit of time to study for that test take the test and then get it reviewed by someone who can give me the permit but that's why you haven't seen any new drone footage in our recent videos and you might not see it for a while there are so many worse problems to have and we are aware of that we really we feel like we're living the dream but it's just we haven't been able to shake the frustration that we felt from those phone calls this is why i didn't want to talk about this because i did like i feel like all we've done is complained for the last few minutes but it has had a big impact on our life as far as what we were planning to do in the future and it's having an immediate impact on this video that we're making we've passed 12 things that i've wanted to draw like idaho is incredible and there's just like i think a drone is a crutch to a lot of filmmakers and one that i lean heavily on like especially when we're in nature like one of the best ways to share that without a doubt is with a drone and i feel so confined with just a handheld camera it feels like we're taking a step back in terms of content and in terms of video quality yeah we'll get it figured out so uh so we've ended up somewhere very unexpected we are at a basque restaurant and apparently boise is a hub for basque culture which is a people group from the northern border region of spain and france for one reason or another a large population of basque immigrants ended up here and their food has become famous in the city so we have ordered croquetas one of my personal favorites and potatoes bravas because we're in idaho idaho potatoes we thought this was like a fusion of idaho culture and bass culture plus they look amazing both of these remind me of spain and we haven't traveled internationally in so long so i'm currently traveling through food i don't even know what's in here here we are aioli we also got fried kelp i don't think we um should have ordered where this hungry even just being behind the camera filming this food makes me feel like we're in another country i miss this it's probably just because it's been taken away from me but [Music] i'm not gonna lie we came here for the croquetas just to relive our time in spain and they did not disappoint [Music] wow boise i don't know if it's just that we haven't been to a city in so long but that was a really cool place morning i uh started using this app called i overlander to find free places to park when we're on a road trip so last night we ended up in the cracker barrel parking lot and this morning we're hitting the road and continuing west as uh as soon as i can get someone out of bed [Music] today we are finally going to make it to oregon so since we're going to be in the car for a while i'm going to answer a few more questions if you would have built the van yourself what would you change we really like the overall layout of this fan which is why we chose it and we've already made all the little changes and upgrades that don't require tearing the whole van apart but if we were going to go to that next level of renovations i think our biggest change would be our dead death situation at this point i think we'd go with something more like eamonn and beck's new bed set up is the van bed comfy unfortunately not the way that these cushions have to go there's really no way to sleep without being on a crack and we've considered getting like a mattress topper but we can't figure out how to store one without taking up half the van is nate ever gonna fix that drawer that won't stay closed probably should because this thing is so annoying but it's kind of one of those things like rick explained in his van tour the other day we're always balancing do we put the kitchen in which we desperately need to do this is where it'll go or do we go on that raft trip or go on that bike trip or go on that climbing trip or do any of the other amazing adventurous things you can do in colorado we had intentions of getting it fixed when we were living in that mechanics garage for a few days but we had to prioritize the safety issues over little things like this which is super annoying but if govind wasn't a thing do you ever think you would have explored the option of van life no or at least not in this phase of life we'd always kind of pictured ourselves traveling the us in an rv or something either when we had kids or when we were old and even earlier this year when we came home due to the pandemic we were still kind of in denial that this would still be going on the rest of the year so buying a van really wasn't on our radar and it kind of took us quarantining for a whole month in a cabin alone to realize that this wasn't going away and here we are our first stop in oregon was this tiny town called echo for no other reason other than a winery in town offered free overnight parking we went inside for a quick tasting but ended up becoming fast friends with the owners who we hung out with swapping travel stories out by the fire until midnight probably our favorite thing about vanlife is the flexibility it gives us we were just planning on passing through this small town but one night turned into two when we got invited to the local corn maze right down the road this wasn't just any corn maze right thank you very much the local wineries had hidden tasting stations inside which just added to the challenge of finding our way out all right here we go see how long it takes [Music] [Laughter] isn't there some crazy like rule like always go left you pick left you chose wrong look at this maybe we should start going right so i feel like the train makes it more creepy for some reason are we only going right now no it's a thing it is late i hate this i hate this so bad i actually feel like i'm in the shining right now running from my killer hey nate i love you hey hey [Music] i'm still going right i just thought it was brave that you went off on your own no i think it's this way no all right it is now completely dark we are back at where we started where nate scared me and we're still not back so i'm going to continue my strategy of going right here people's 3am they haven't eaten in hours one hour and four minutes my gosh and we had to use the map we'd still be walking around in circles if it wasn't for the map that we took a picture of we've been circling for an hour highly underestimated i just nailed my knee oh wait what's that lineup expiry i made that an e look i didn't know how to spell it i just got distracted autocorrect has not been good over 70 different stunts and a world record 433 broken bones he miraculously survived all his daredevil attempts what the x2 sky cycle was meant to be a high-powered motorcycle but transformed into a rocket due to design technicalities motorcycle rocket also how cool is this for some reason i'm fascinated by the oregon trail and an immigrant's diary entry from july 28 1851 recorded the three miles i remember brought salmon creek falls where a good water moderate supply of grass that's definitely where you press hunt on the game you could probably hunt it right here in computer class in elementary school and then yeah yeah it was like ten dollars a person the sign said five and i paid 26. so i'm still confused about that five dollars in person she was like that'd be twenty six dollars it's too early to argue you can't scare me again nate i know you're there i'm not gonna move until you do [Music]

Channel: Kara and Nate

Views: 1,076,202

Rating: 4.8544302 out of 5

Keywords: #vanlife, couple vlog, daily vlog, full time travel, husband and wife, husband and wife travel, husband and wife vlog, kara and nate, kara and nate vlog, sprinter van, sprinter van conversion, tiny home, tiny home on wheels, travel, travel couple, travel duo, travel hacks, travel music, travel vlog, travel vlogger, travel vloggers, usa travel, van life, van life usa, vlog music, van life idaho, van life utah, van life oregon, road trip, national parks, usa road trip

Id: RHvHn9hs1MY

Length: 23min 32sec (1412 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 21 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/doshinka]

The thing that was the funniest to me is they said "we have to pay a certain amount of money in a certain amount of time and if not there is going to be a court order and then an arrest warrant" and my husband who never saw a single video of them went "yeah... That's what you call a fine..." and asked me why they are making it so dramatic.

[u/Spare_Onion18]

Wow, I have absolutely no sympathy for them over this. They're not even banned from filming - They're just banned from filming without a permit. And the permit cost is not prohibitive, as Nate even suggests. They just don't want to plan ahead and play by the rules. Plenty of parks also deny commercial requests for very good reasons. I think of Acadia National Park and Zion National Park, for example, which have severe issues with overcrowding and media coverage often does more harm than good. But K&N just want to serve themselves. I've "quit" their channel so many times only to end up watching a video and getting irritated like this again. I wish I'd just stop watching, lol.

[u/BClark09]

The Part 107 stuff for the drone makes sense given that they’re making money off the footage. But the national parks issue not so much. If the parks are going to go after every YouTuber who uploads a video about visiting their parks, the only PR they’re gonna get is about how out of touch with the times their rules are instead of, you know, the parks themselves.

[u/Albort]

it could be a good thing, we all know national parks and tons of guides on it already. now they are visiting places i have no clue about.

i just pinned Shoshone Falls just now, had no idea something that beautiful existed... i wished i knew when i did my road trip to Yellowstone. Sucks that it happened. will continue to watch.

[u/shaohtsai]

A little paperwork never hurt nobody.

[u/insertunique]

The more I think about this the less sympathetic I get.

If they really just wanted to share why they’re not visiting NPs say “it looks like we’re not able to meet the commercial use requirements for national parks, so we’ll have to do them another time.” Instead they painted themselves as victims after publicly fudging individual/commercial lines and getting caught. And truly, this isn’t a gray area for commercial use: it is commercial use.

Commercial use is not only about disruption but also intent. The NPS is not here to facilitate other people making money. It is a service for recreation and tourism. So like some roads ban commercial vehicles of any size, when they’re acting as “Kara & Nate” the business they have different rules and responsibilities.

It’s also stuck with me that they once shared they intentionally travel internationally a certain number of days to avoid US taxes on their revenue (obviously they can’t do that this year, but previously they did).

Idk. They’re free to do what they want but I think it’s exceptionally shitty that they (& fans on Twitter) are framing this as a shortcoming of the NPS instead of owning the fuck up on their end.

[u/pokemanzred]

I agree that they should pay more because of their commercial use, But I permit system could use an update to accommodate people like Kara and Nate.

The $80 they pay now for an entire year is not a fair price for their use.

[u/SweetBre92]

Have any other youtubers been report to the FAA for commercial drone use? I know Casey Neistat was under investigation for a while, but he still uses drone footage.

[u/DF7]

Thank god. Their drone shots in Rocky Mountain National Park were infuriating. There are a lot of very good reasons drones are prohibited in parks, and a responsible drone owner would know why. I'm sure RMNP has extensive signage too, so I am certain they knowingly ignored the rules. Whining about getting caught violating federal law comes across as so entitled.