Get a Hobby

The holidays can be stressful for everyone, but in our coupledom, it is especially so. Between December 20th and February 20th, we experience the following gift-giving holidays: Christmas, anniversary, birthdays for both myself and M (and Dog!), and Valentine’s Day. On the one hand, it’s kind of convenient to knock out all of the gift-giving for the year right away, but on the other hand, I have to think it would be nice to have something to look forward to after February. So in our household the challenge is to find a gift that keeps on giving and giving to get you back around to December, and boy did I win Christmas 2019 (Christmas is a competition, right?) with the gift I got for M. In my quest to find an experience-based gift that we could use together throughout the year, I landed on the 2020 WI State Parks Pass. We had been to enough Wisconsin state parks in 2019 to have warranted a pass, but never actually took the plunge. 2020 would be different. Not only was this a hobby we could do together, we could also bring Dog with to the parks, and there was no shortage of parks within easy driving distance of our house. This also fit well into our plans to become ultra fit in 2020 (ha!), since by Christmas 2019 we were both sitting rather uncomfortably at our lifetime peak chubbiness. Because I am personally motivated by gamification, I printed up a bingo card with 24 randomly selected parks (big mistake – didn’t factor in proximity to other parks or drive time) and a sticker set for us to keep in the car, and just like that, we had a new hobby!

The Cheat Code to Life

If you’ve been around M or me for any significant period of time, you’ve probably heard us mention that we think walking is the cheat code to life. It’s one of our mantras and, we’re pretty sure, a universal truth. Walking is free, you can do it almost anywhere, it’s good for your mental and physical health, you can bring the pup, and ideally you get outside which has all kinds of other benefits. But one of the cooler things about walking is that its an actual mode of transportation! You get all of those benefits AND you actually arrive somewhere. Using our house as a base, we walk all over – to city and county parks, through fancy neighborhoods, to our friends’ houses, to beer gardens, to the dog park, to the river walk, to coffee shops and breakfast cafes, to the grocery store and other shops. We absolutely cannot get enough. And hiking (or at least the version of hiking we are familiar with) is just a cooler version of walking. So we were pretty excited to tie on the old hiking boots and hit the trails with our new parks pass – so many cool new places to walk around and explore!

Park People

We are officially Park People^TM now. We started using our parks pass on January 4, 2020 and we haven’t stopped yet. We hiked in every season and in all four corners of the state. We were splashed by the angry waters of Lake Michigan in a winter storm, and jumped from truck-sized boulders into Devil’s Lake to cool down in the summer. We kayaked through the sea caves on the shore of Lake Superior and scaled the bluffs of the Mississippi River at Wyalusing. We have never once visited a state park and regretted the trip. Even when trails are flooded, or it’s so cold that your hair freezes into a brick, or you almost get run over by a mountain biker, we all three agree that it’s still better than sitting at home rewatching the mock-umentary du jour on Netflix.

How to State Park

We knocked out the nearby parks pretty quickly, and then had to start factoring longer drives into our hiking days. One of our favorite ways to hit a state park is to think to ourselves on any given Wednesday “Hey, we don’t have anything on the calendar for the weekend!” Then pick a random cluster of parks in some remote pocket of the state, and book a night at a dog-friendly hotel. We’ll leave at the crack of dawn on Saturday and spend the day bouncing from park to park to get to our destination, and then do the same thing Sunday on the way home. We also like to break up longer drives (like the 5hr drive back to my hometown which we make several times a year) with a few hours at a state park, which has dramatically improved our attitudes on travel days. When we started out, we didn’t have much in the way of equipment, but over the course of the year, we did start to accumulate some tools to make our hiking excursions a little smoother. For day trips though, we can usually get by with just our boots, weather-appropriate clothing, a leash for Dog and water that we leave in the car. We aren’t camping people just yet, but I really want to try camping at some of the cooler parks we’ve seen, just to spend more time there and see what else they have to offer. Maybe in 2021!

Below you can see a (very) rough map of all of the parks that we hit in 2020:

Perfect Timing

Wowza. We could not have picked a more perfect year to pilot the state parks pass. By the time the pandemic well and truly hit in our neck of the woods, we had used the pass 4 times already, but it quickly became the crown jewel in our hobby closet. There are only so many rounds of gin you can play (before you ask, yes, we are 80 years old) with your significant other before you start longing for the great outdoors, and our parks pass was our ticket out. Just like everyone, in 2020 we had to cancel vacations and travel plans, quit our rec sports leagues, and ditch our in-person gatherings for clubs and hobbies. But we still had the parks. The state parks gave us something to do and somewhere to go that wasn’t our house. We could be “alone together” outside and never come within 6ft of another person. We could get exercise while our gym was closed, and explore new places while there were travel restrictions. In trying to make the best of a bad situation, we even planned an entire road trip around the state parks last summer to give us the feeling of a “real” vacation again, and it was one of the best vacations we’ve ever taken. In the understatement of the century, 2020 was a real bummer of a year, but I feel very confident in saying that the parks pass and the fact that the parks largely remained open at limited capacity through the majority of the pandemic were the things that kept us from spiraling into full-on pits of despair. 

Bang For Your Buck

Wisconsin maintains more than 80 different parks and natural areas. Most of those have several unique trails and attractions, and even the parks that we’ve been to 7 or 8 times (looking at you, Devil’s Lake) still seem like they have something new to offer every time we visit. We are continually shocked at how little it takes to see an old park from a new perspective. Even doing an old tried and true trail in reverse can be a wildly different experience, and that’s not even touching on the fact that you basically get a whole new set of parks every time the seasons change.