Passport to Texas

The day Dale Blasingame bought his Texas State Park pass. Photo credit: Dale Blasingame.

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This is Passport to Texas

A dream is a wish your heart makes. So says the song from the 1950s Disney classic, Cinderella. Perhaps the night Dale Blasingame had a dream about driving around the country—his heart was revealing its deepest wish.

I woke up that next day, and it was all I could think about—and I was coming to the end of the semester and I was about to have a break. And so I just decided to go for it. And so, I went on this trip across the entire west.

During his travels, Dale—a social journalism lecturer at Texas State University—visited national parks.

When I got home, it was one of those vacation blues type things, where I was just kind of bored. And a friend of mine suggested that I go to a state park. And, that kind of spawned the whole thing.

That thing: visit Texas’ 95 state parks in a single year. He writes about his journey in the January/February issue of Texas Parks and Wildlife magazine.

I really didn’t do a ton of planning. There were a couple of times I took big, huge trips and I would hit 15 or 18 parks at one time. But it really just kind of started as: ‘Okay, here’s this one. This is the next closest one—I’m going to go there…’  I’d wake up on a Saturday morning, or I’d think about it the Friday the night before, and ask: ‘Where am I going to go tomorrow?’

Tomorrow Dale Blasingame tells us how he found a hiking buddy. Read his story, One is Not Enough, in the January/February issue of Texas Parks and Wildlife magazine.

That’s our show… Funding provided in part by Ram Trucks. Guts. Glory. Ram.

For Texas Parks and Wildlife…I’m Cecilia Nasti.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 13th, 2016 at 12:00 am and is filed under TPW Mag. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.