Our “50 States” Bucket List
If you haven’t already registered from the list of our tours in the “Previous Tours” summary, we really like the United States of America !!
And if you have been paying close attention you will know that we have been building up the number of states we have visited to mark off our “Bucket List” aim of visiting all 50 States of the USA – and also knocking off a large number of the (currently) 63 National Parks along the way.
I have decided to “unify” all these trips in one section and add links to a couple of shorter entries (“abridged tours”) for the trips we did prior to me starting my tour blogs in 2011. We hope to get all those states ticked off but it’s a work in progress !
So this section brings all our tours together in one place – a summary of what has turned into our adventure to visit all 50 States 🙂
Our current tally …. (as of September 2023)
- States Visited – 50 of 50 – completed !
- National Parks Visited – 46 of 63
The story all began in 2005 ……..
Links to our trips so far …
2005 – “West Coast for Beginners”
2008 – “I Feel a Plan Coming On – East Coast – Disney World – Southwest”
2009 – “Oh, those National Parks ! – Yellowstone, the Southwest and California”
2019 – “Mid West & Great Lakes USA”
The National Parks
They have been described as “America’s Best Idea” and you would get no argument from us on this !
Very quickly in our travels to the USA, we became hooked on them ! And now we also try to include visits to the National Parks when we go on our USA tours.
There are currently 63 (as of September 2023) protected areas known as national parks that are operated by the National Park Service, an agency of the Department of the Interior. National Parks must be established by an act of the United States Congress. The first national park, Yellowstone, was signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant in 1872, followed by Mackinac National Park in 1875 (decommissioned in 1895), and then Rock Creek Park (later merged into National Capital Parks), Sequoia and Yosemite in 1890. The Organic Act of 1916 created the National Park Service “to conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and wildlife therein, and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.” Many current National Parks had been previously protected as National Monuments by the President under the Antiquities Act before being upgraded by Congress.
Criteria for the selection of National Parks include natural beauty, unique geological features, unusual ecosystems, and recreational opportunities (though these criteria are not always considered together). National Monuments, on the other hand, are frequently chosen for their historical or archaeological significance. A few former national parks are no longer designated as such, or have been disbanded. Other units of the National Park Service (well over 400 altogether) are sometimes incorrectly or broadly referred to as national parks – but we have visited a number of these and they can be well worth it as well !
Visiting all 50 states is one challenge – getting to all the National Parks will be something else, and quite a bigger challenge. Let’s see how we go !
Links to a list of those we have visited –