How Our Journey Began            

Mark and I have always loved traveling, especially to the National Parks.  For years we toyed with the idea of visiting all the national parks. I love nothing better than the ability to scratch items off a list.  Visited all 50 states? Check! Visited all Major League Baseball ballparks? Check!  It was just a natural extension for us to want to visit all the National Parks.  In the summer of 2017, I spent several days helping a friend recover from ankle surgery.  During my stay, she made the comment that she hoped her recovery would not stop her from visiting 60 countries before she turned 60.  And then the lightbulb popped on in my head.

Similar to Michael Keaton’s character, Bill Blazejowski in the classic 1982 film Night Shift, I’m an “Idea Person.”  I come up with crazy, what if ideas.  This time was no exception.  What if we visited all 59 parks before we turn 59? We could call our quest “Fifty-nine by 59.” The name alone has a great ring to it.  We could write a book, create a website and even start social media pages.  When I returned home, I pitched the idea to Mark.  I am sure there was much hand gesturing and voice inflections on my part.  If I had been an emoji it probably would have been the flamenco dancer, with red dress twirling and an emphatic foot stomp.  Mark looked at me and said, “You know that only gives us four years to accomplish this feat.” Ummm is that going to be a problem? Like all my other random ideas, he nodded and went back to what he was doing.  I assumed that this idea went into the trash bin in his mind with all of my other random thoughts.  However, two days later he had an entire spreadsheet of how we could accomplish this feat; color-coded and everything. When laid out on paper, it was much more daunting, but Mark had figured out how we could do it and somehow stay gainfully employed.

We had only made it through three parks when the unthinkable happened…some political horse trading occurred and suddenly The Gateway Arch had become the 60^th national park.  My cute Fifty-nine by 59 moniker and the hashtags I had assigned to my social media, went out the door with one stroke of the Presidential pen.  I think my reaction was akin to when I was told I flunked my zoology final my senior year in high school; shock, disbelief and a little panic.  After a suitable mourning period passed, I got to work trying to come up with a better name.  Sixty by 60 didn’t have the same ring…and what if they add a 61^st park (they did and we are up to 62 as of this writing)? When I would come up with names, I would write them down, usually on a napkin with a broken crayon or whatever I could find rolling around the floorboard of my car.  Nothing felt right.  I am not sure when the inspiration hit me, but when it did, I knew it was perfect.  “The Parks are Calling,” it marries the two things we love; National Parks and baseball.  At some point we might expand our website to include the MLB ballparks, but for now, we will continue our quest through the NPS system. 

Mark took early retirement and we are taking a couple of “gap years” to continue this quest and hopefully meet our original goal of visiting all the National Parks before Mark’s 59^th birthday. And if you were wondering, I did not flunk that zoology final.  My teacher used the wrong key to grade the exam.  Unlike my F, the Gateway Arch National Park, and its 91 acres, is not going away.  But that is a blog post for another day.