We're more than excited to begin our 2016 adventure of visiting every state park in Virginia. When we first really decided that we were going to go ahead with this challenge we mapped out the year so we would have a better chance of meeting our goal.

The Plan

We discovered that in order to visit all 36 Virginia State Parks in one year we would need to visit an average of 3 parks a month (not an easy task at our age with a lot of out-of-town weddings to attend). To make it easier we can break the visits into 11 day-trips where we visit 1-2 parks each, and 8 overnight adventures visiting 3 or more parks each time. 

We decided early on in our plans that to make a park visit count we had to hike at least 1-mile. That doesn't seem like much, but we figured depending on weather and time constraints it would be adequate for us.

To make this challenge financially possible as well we opted for a State Park Plus pass which gives us a years’ worth of admissions and discounts on rentals, camping, and a few other perks.

January 1: First Landing State Park

Since the holidays wore us out with traveling, we decided to stick close to home on New Year’s Day (because we had to hit a park on the 1st of the year!) We began this morning by hiking a couple trails locally at First Landing State Park with our canine companion Mr. Rigby. We lucked out with mild weather for a January hike with slight cloud cover, no wind, and low 50's. 

The Hike

We have visited First Landing State Park before (fun fact: the same day we shared our first kiss, cue an "awww") and decided to choose a different trail than one we had already hiked. We opted for the Bald Cyprus Trail which would give us a nice 1.8 mile hike, in addition to the .6 miles we walked from the parking area to the Trail Center. Mid-way through we decided to add a leg and also hiked the High Dune Trail twice; which we definitely recommend.

The boardwalk over the Bald Cypress Swamp is a great place to observe wildlife 

It was a perfect day for a hike, and the rainy, warm weather we've had the last two weeks gave way to some stunning vegetation. We saw pale green lichens, vibrant low mosses, and large trees draped with Spanish moss interspersed throughout the trail. The highlights included heavily wooded swamp areas with waters darkened from tannin punctuated by the cypress pneumatophores evident in some of our pictures in this article.

If you would like to go on your own adventure to First Landing State Park and would like more information about this park, click here. 

Guest Bloggers Peter Radlowski, Sarah Sumoski and Mr. Rigby plan to tackle all 36 Virginia State Parks in 2016 and they invite you to come along on the adventure with them.