Domenico Clementi
More than anything, I love to travel: I “draw” my trips first in my head, then on paper, and finally on the road.
I was born in Verona, Italy, on November 10, 1969, a proud Scorpio. I love science and technology: I hold a degree in Management Engineering and have worked in IT for thirty years. I'm the founder, president & CEO of Palladio20 Loft&Terrace, a holiday rental whose furnishings some would not hesitate to call rather eccentric, a short walk from Verona's historic center.
How it all began
My passion for travel was born when I was about twelve, and my mother drove me around the most hidden corners of Sardinia in a white Renault 4.
Maybe I was a curious kid by nature, maybe I was raised to be curious. Either way, that trip through places so wonderfully different from anything I knew was a turning point in my life, and it clearly showed me a passion worth pursuing.
Why this guide
Years later I came across an Instagram post: the route data scientist Randy Olson had calculated in 2016, for the National Park Service centennial, to link the national parks of the lower 48 in a single road trip. About 14,500 miles, found with the “traveling salesman problem”: given a set of cities, find the shortest loop that visits each one exactly once and returns to the start.
That name took me back to my Operations Research classes at engineering school, a subject I had truly loved. And to the Christmas holidays I spent with a friend delivering poinsettias for a florist around Verona: we were paid by distance, so the better we optimized the route, the more we earned.
Then the discovery: I couldn't find a guide offering an itinerary to visit every national park in the lower 48 in a single trip. People who try usually split the challenge into several trips, by region. And meanwhile the parks had grown to 51, or 63 counting Alaska, Hawaii, American Samoa and the Virgin Islands.
From one question, whether anyone had ever tried to visit them all in one journey, Great Wild Journey was born.
The trips that led here
From that Renault 4 to today, the places that taught me how to travel.
The series
A couple of lines on the series this guide opens, with a link to the series page.
Write to me
Questions, tips, travel stories: write to me from the Contact page.