Happy Thursday! It’s time to update my bucket lists – my National Parks list and my Trolls list. In the last couple of weeks, we’ve visited two more national parks and found one more Dambo troll.

The photo above is of Bear Gulch Reservoir in Pinnacles National Park. It was a fun hike getting to the reservoir. We hiked through the Bear Gulch Caves, which is a giant fissure or canyon in the earth where huge boulders have fallen in to make the narrow canyon look like caves. This national park wasn’t filled with tourists, like many national parks are. It’s kind of a hidden gem!

We also visited Channel Islands National Park. On the boat ride over to Santa Cruz Island, we saw humpback whales. They were really close to our boat! The boat captain said they were as close as he’s ever seen them. So cool!

Once on the island, we hiked up to Cavern Point, which had great views. We really appreciated having a volunteer with the National Park Service hike with us and relay interesting information about the island. We’ve now visited 43 of the 64 parks. The NPS recently added another national park – the Chiricahua National Monument is now Chiricahua National Park! I guess we’ll be traveling back to Arizona at some point!

And lastly, we made a stop in Solvang, California, to add another troll to our list. Lulu is the only troll to be found indoors. I love how she was built right up to the ceiling!

Here’s her story:

That’s it for the update. I hope you have a great day and get to learn or do something NEW today! Take care!