Numbers 30 and 31

 I don't know why I get so excited about this, but I love adding to  my National Parks album. We visited #30 and 31 in October.

Wind Cave National Park            South Dakota

Badlands National Park                                     South Dakota

Blue Ridge Parkway

This is what our typical day on the Blue Ridge Parkway looked like. We intended to drive the 469 miles, but after about 20 miles of this every day, we had to make another plan. The parkway starts at the end of the Smoky Mountain National Park and ends at Shenandoah National Park.

We were on the parkway 3 days. Finally, on the the last day, we didn't have fog.

One of our stops on the parkway

Near the railroad tracks I spotted a waterfall.

Blue Ridge Parkway Sunset

Another stop on the parkway: Peaks of Otter

The Rest of My National Parks Album

Title Page

Great Smokey MountainsGreat Sand DunesGuadalupeJoshua TreeSaguroKings Canyon and SequoiaYosemite GlacierThe next four are Canadaian National Parks

Banff JasperYoho Kootenay

Great BasinOlympicArches Redwood

Mt. Ranier

Everglades

BiscayneNatchez Trace Parkway, not a park but a national scenic parkway. Channel Islands

More National Park Album

I have enjoyed working on this album as much as anything I have done. I am almost finished. I just need to finish the title page and finish putting the flowers and dates on the rest of the pages. There are about 30 pages so I decided to go ahead and post the finished ones so you won't have to look at all 30 at once! The first one is Carlsbad. I have a little formula going on here with a picture of us and a picture of the sign for a title. We went to Carlsbad when we were teenagers. I went with friends after working at Glorieta for the summer and he went with his family. We are both 18.Rocky Mountain was the first park we visited in 1968. We have been back twice, once last fall with one of our grandsons. Big Bend is another one we have visited 3 times. Padre Island National Seashore is not a park, but I wanted to include it.Hot Springs in Arkansas
The Grand CanyonThe Petrified ForestMesa VerdeBuffalo National River is not a park, either.Yellowstone

The Grand Tetons

The Black Canyon of the Gunnison

My National Parks Scrapbook

I made the first page in my newest project today. I have been searching my albums for weeks, finding my favorite photos of national parks and having them printed. Some of them are even Polaroids if you can believe my husband ever stooped to use a Polaroid camera. The idea for this album started when I met a lady on the boat to the Channel Island National Park in January. She told me there were 50 National Parks and her goal was to go to all of them and so far she had been to 25. I was surprised to hear there were only 50 national parks so when I got home, I looked it up and it turns out there are 58. I printed a list and my husband and I went over it and discovered we had been to 27 of them. There are many more areas under the National Parks Service but only 58 of them are national parks. There are also national rivers, national seashores, national lakes, national historic sites and many other designations, 388 in all. You can look at them here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Park_Service

This page is Crater Lake National Park in Oregon. It is a really beautiful one and the only national park in Oregon. We have been to some of the other national sites, too, and I am going to include a few of the most interesting of them like Buffalo National River, Natchez Trace Parkway and Padre Island National Seashore. I am going to try to include a photo of us at each park. I also found photos of the signs for each of the parks which will be my title. The first national park we both visited was Carlsbad Caverns. We both went when we were teenagers and didn't take any photos. I went with friends and he went with his family. All the others we went together, some with kids but most just the two of us.