One of our first trips after being married was to the White Mountains in New Hampshire. During this trip we fell in love with hiking and almost every trip since was based around going someplace new and hiking as many trails as we could. Vacations did not change much when we started having kids. We started going to National Parks for family vacations (LOTS OF HIKES). These were usually car camping trips with our three daughters. Let’s just say the kids did not like hiking as much as the “parentals”. When they were younger: we had parent’s morning and kid’s afternoon. Parents always chose hiking and kids could pick whatever they wanted. As they got older and could hike farther parent’s morning started stretching into kid’s afternoon. At this point we became OK with bribes. Hike this far to get a beanie baby. Yep, this goes back a few years. About this time our youngest (Jamie) asked me the big question. When are we going to Disney World? I let her down easy by saying…. NEVER. I told her she could go when she had a job and could pay for it herself. The girls (Jennifer, Julie and Jamie) went to college have good jobs and ultimately made the trip to Orlando without us.
At this point in our lives vacation planning was pretty easy: where haven’t we been and where are there great hikes (in the US)? At one point Leann asked me how many national parks have we visited. I checked, turns out we had been to 40. She then asked how many national parks are there? Once again I didn’t know but a little research told me 59 (more now). She said, we should do the rest of them! That sounded great to me.
We have 2 rules in this journey:
- We have to visit the parks together
- If we visited a place that became a National Park after we visited, we count it.
Here is the current list of all US National Parks:
http://www.nationalparkservice.org/national-parks-alphabetical.html
I will post all of our NP visits in the order we visited. I hope you enjoy our journey from 1 to ?????
Happy trails,
Steve