GPK Goes on Vacation

Originally planned to arrive in September 2021 as the second retail series of that calendar year, GPK Goes on Vacation endured a grueling seventeen-month wait before Topps finally delivered it to shelves on February 22, 2023. By then, the title on the packaging had been rebranded to 2023 Series 1. The delay had been triggered by an industry-wide explosion in card demand that collided with pandemic disruptions, contract demands, paper shortages, and printer logjams. That backlog became so severe that Book Worms, an installment planned for a later window, actually made it into collectors' hands first. When the vacation set finally surfaced, it retained the structural model of Food Fight rather than the format shifts that followed it. It was the final delayed set from that backlog.

The core of the release is a two-hundred card base set built around one hundred fresh paintings paired across standard "a" and "b" sticker designations. Everything in the checklist centers around travel and related elements such as luggage, transportation, and landmarks. Four franchise regulars completed the whole run, with Brent Engstrom handling fifty-six cards, Joe McWilliams delivering fifty-two, Joe Simko painting forty-eight, and David Gross finishing forty-four. The autograph checklist omitted Artie of Massage, Absconding Abby, and Water Fallon. There were no variations in the base checklist.

Topps distributed the release through Collector boxes, standard Retail Display boxes, and ten-pack luggage-themed blaster tins in green, purple, and yellow. Fat packs were dropped from the retail lineup entirely, which eliminated purple borders from the parallel rainbow. Booger Green cards landed one per pack across retail boxes, while Bruised Black borders appeared one per pack exclusively in Collector boxes. Blasters held exclusive Phlegm Yellow parallels, while numbered borders ranged from Retail Display Spit Blue cards stamped to 99 and Collector-only Blood Red cards limited to 75 copies, down to Route 66 Asphalt borders numbered to 66 and Fool's Gold cards limited to 50 copies.

Inserts were divided sharply across formats, led by Tom Bunk's ten-card Famous Landmarks run in Display boxes and the Don't Make Me Pull This Car Over cards tucked into retail packs at one-in-three odds. Collector tins supplied luggage tags alongside exclusive Pack Your Bags Wacky Packages cards and State Quarter Relics numbered to 99 copies. Topps announced that the Wyoming card had been pulled, leaving only forty-nine states on the official checklist, but copies of the Wyoming relic surfaced in packs anyway. The set marked the first time odds were printed on wrappers for the nine Employee Short Prints, and pack odds across the entire release proved remarkably accurate. With pack production estimated at 1,737,000 packs, it stood as the fourth largest print run of the modern era.