50 Things I Plan To Do Before I turn 50 (50 by 50) #50by50

At the beginning of this year, I joined an awesome women’s networking group called Polka Dot Powerhouse where I have met some amazing women and a few have inspired me and help me grow.  I am so super thankful to them as my life has changed for the better and they have given me tools to get there.  One of these amazing people is the Managing Director of Polka Dot for the Arvada, Colorado chapter, Jacki Cox.  She announced that she was doing a 40 by 40 challenge to celebrate turning 40 next year.  She created a list of 40 things she would like to accomplish by then and she invited others to join in with her.  I thought and pondered and then realized, hey, I will be turning 50 in 5 years!!  That is super crazy, right?!?!?!  Where did the time fly?   So I decided to do a 50 by 50 list.  50 things I would like to accomplish before I turn 50!  I have been thinking on this list and pondering, what exactly I would like to accomplish.  There are so many things that I have said I wanted to do, but have I really written any of them down? Not really.  Have actually planned any of them?  Not really.  I just hoped they would just come up naturally and I could cross them off “my list”, the one that is not actually written down!  I have had this list on my to do list for awhile as well and have kept putting off and putting it off.  Well, Jacki completed one of her items this weekend, she hiked her first 14er!!!  I am so excited for her and she and Alana Wright, who completed this 14er with Jacki have so inspired me today, that I actually complied my list.  And I am super excited to get going on it!!  I am actually going to be planning and making this all happen!! My heart is soaring and the surge of energy I feel right now is so amazing!!!

I started to work on the list and I have come to a bit of a challenge here!!  I wanted to visit every single national park we have in this country. But how many is that???  Well,  I Google this fun fact and, did you know, that there are 58 National Parks in the U.S.??  58!!!!  That is a feat that you need a lot of time off and flexibility to be able to travel around the country, seeing these national parks.  So, time to start eliminating!  I created a list of the parks I have had the chance to visit, all I have visited with my ex-husband except for 1.  So here are the parks I have been to and they are not in order of when I visited them.

1. Arches – Utah
2. Bryce Canyon -Utah
3. Canyon Lands – Utah
4. Carlsbad Caverns -New Mexico
5. Glacier National – Montana
6. Grand Canyon – Arizona
7. Grand Teton – Wyoming
8. Joshua Tree – California
9. Petrified Forest – Arizona
10. Rocky Mountain – Colorado
11. Mesa Verde – Colorado
12. Yellowstone – Wyoming/Montana/Idaho
13. Zion – Utah

So I have 45 left to visit.  Not bad, right?   9 parks a year!  That is still something you have to have great flexibility for! But there are some of those parks above that I want to visit again.  So I listed those out.  Ha ha!!!  It comes out that I want to go to all of them again!!!   Yellowstone and Rocky I have been to a lot.  Rocky is my go to at the moment and I can go there every week if I like, or at least 1 to 2 times a month as this is on my hiking schedule!  So I can say 11 of the 13 I want to visit again!

To try to hit the 45 that I have not yet visited in 5 years, I will have to travel to 9 a year to hit that! It is already July, so I technically have 4.5 years left to complete this!  The only one of any of the national parks I can be sure that I hit this is Rocky!  One of my go tos!  LOL!!  So add back the 11 I want to see again and there are 56!!  56 national parks to visit in 4.5 years!   11.2 a year to reach my gaol!!  I am going to have to figure this out!!!

Below is the list of the national parks in the U.S.  I got this list from http://www.nationapark-adventures.com.  It is by state and it has the year it was established.