I am starting a new and ambitious project, visiting every one of the 387 Jacksonville city parks.

I have always loved parks and being outside. The germination of this project started the day before my Dad died. Since that day the project has evolved quite a bit and turned into some MUCH bigger than I had originally envisioned. The week prior to my Dad’s passing I was on vacation from work. I had reached a point at work that I really needed a break. I turned my phone off and never once even checked my work email. I explained to Bride that I needed a week to myself, to douche my brain as a good friend of mine called it. Bride was perfectly understanding, as she always is and let me just have the week without any pressure to do anything together. Don’t get me wrong – I LOVE hanging out with Bride and do all the time, this was different though. I planned out the week – day one would be spent laying on my back watching the clouds. I did so for almost 6 hours in three different locations. That was a great day and I took lots of pictures of the clouds. Day 2 was spent visiting nurseries and driving neighborhoods looking at flowers and beautiful landscaping, that consumed about 9 hours and I got a lot more pictures. 5 hours of day 3 was spent in tool stores and almost 7 hours of day 4 were spent in toy stores. Day 5 had me visiting city parks, spending some time in each and writing and pondering and just thoroughly enjoying myself. It was a great week and I started every day at the beach watching the sunrise.

Day 6 started at the beach and ended with those fateful calls from my Sister leading up to my Dad's death that morning. Wow, what a shitty way to end such a fabulous week is all I kept thinking. I think I was still in shock when I got home, I do not remember much from that day. The one thing I do remember was getting on the internet to learn more about one of the parks I was in the previous day, Memorial park in Riverside. That is when I learned that Jacksonville Florida has more city parks than ANY other city in the country. On the web it indicated that there were 337 parks covering over 80,000 acres. WOW, I remember thinking that is so cool. That is when I had the idle thought, wouldn’t it be cool to visit all of them. I also found out the information about Memorial Park, quite a history in that park. Visiting all the parks was a fleeting thought at the time. I had other things on my mind, getting to Ohio for a funeral and all. I did not really think about it again until I was in Ohio. My Sister and I spent some time at Kiser Lake, a State park close to where we grew up. We went there all the time as kids, Mom drug us over there all the time. Our family was NOT moneyed and the park was free so we spent A LOT of time there. My Sister and I laughed about all the time we spent here, all the trails we knew and how much a part of our youth this park actually was.

I seem to remember mentioning to my Sister that Jacksonville had more parks than any city in the country. We did not really talk about it but it was back in my mind – should I try to visit all those parks in my adopted home town? Well by the time I got home from Ohio, I was convinced that I would visit all those parks. I remember Bride and me talking and wondering if anyone had ever been to all of them. Maybe some long in the tooth employee within parks department and then again maybe not. This is when I started looking on the City of Jacksonville web site for information about our park system. I got frustrated with the site, I could not find any information about a list of the parks. I emailed some names listed in the site with NOT ONE response. I decided to speak to my City Councilman, one email to him had me the Director of the Parks departments name, email address and telephone number. I decided that vote for my council member was well placed and that if he ran again I would vote for him a second time. Well after a few emails from her I had a link to a list of all the parks. That site sucked, I tried to reverse engineer the link she gave me and I still could not find that page by simply looking on the site for it.

That was when this crazy idea to visit all the parks took a drastic turn. I thought, why not create my own web site that is easier to navigate than this cumbersome monster the city put together. While this was the first big turn my idea had taken, sadly it would not be the last. At this point, I still remember thinking I could get this licked in a year. I was being foolish. After getting the list of parks, I realized that the list was sorted alphabetically, not geographically. How stupid was that I remember thinking, I have to know the name of the park to find information about it. I thought I should be able to search by area of town or at least zip code, nothing doing on this site. I realized my first order of business was to create a geographical map, one that showed the city and showed a pushpin where every park is located. This way I could look at an area of town and map out a course to visit the parks in that area. I than realized that task alone would be daunting, gathering the names and addressed of almost 400 parks. Once that information was gathered I still had to create a map with pushpins indicating the location of each. I was back in touch with the Director of the Parks department trying to get the list of park addressed in a spread sheet or database so I could automate some of this process. Nothing doing, she stopped responding to my requests all together.

It took me nearly 18 hours to create an interactive map that had a pushpin in the location of each park. Each pushpin, when clicked, would expand to a little cloud showing the parks name and address. During the process I was still attempting to define what it was, exactly, I was trying to do. It was also during this process that I realized there was going to be NO way I could do this in one year. My idea was to go and sit in each park, sit and ponder and then take some pictures. When done I would write what my feelings were in the park and my opinions about it. I would also list out the amenities, how many picnic tables, is there a boat ramp, and are there trails? I was thinking at least 2 hours per park would be required to properly “get the feel” of the park to be able to write about it. Well at almost 400 parks, that is more than one a day if I wanted to finish in 1 year. One a day in a county, that covers almost 900 square miles – that ain’t happening at one per day. I am now hopeful that I will be able to cover the parks in 3 years, that is about two and half parks a week and I think if I plot my course correctly, I can make it in three years. With a more realistic time line I then got back to why I am doing this, what am I trying to accomplish.

With that question still unanswered I continued to plan my approach to completing this project. One good friend of mine told me this would be a great project for an eagle scout. I believe now that it is going to be a much bigger project than an eagle scout dare take on . This same friend asked me how many hours I was estimating I would have into this project when I was done. That thought had never once occurred to me, we laughed and he said keeping track of that would probably be the easiest part of the project. I had decided to scale back my idea of a dedicated web site for this project and decided I could use a blog to accomplish the same thing. I was familiar with the format and since my blog is searchable, it would cover my needs. I could tag each post with zip code, area of town, amenities and such and that would allow the contents to be easily searched. It took me a better than a week to get the format I wanted to display the information in my blog, but I am now happy with the set up. It has a search feature that searches every word in the blog and I also designed a quick search feature that allows users to click on the tags and it would bring up all parks that were tagged with that information.

I have now decided that this project is a tribute to my parents. It may seem weird to you but here is the dysfunctional logic I used to decide that. The reason Mom took us to the park all the time is because we had no money. One of the reasons we had no money is because my Dad rarely paid child support to my Mom. So because of that action, or lack of action, on my Dad’s part I developed a love of the outdoors from Mom on those trip to Kiser Lake. I am dedicating this challenge to Mom and the Blog about it to Dad. I love and miss them both.

Here is a link to the parks site.
http://mroatmealvisitstheparks.blogspot.com/

Any Feedback on this new blog will be appreciated