Gotta Catch ‘em All

I apologize for using the tagline from Pokemon.  I have only seen a minute of the show and don’t wish to see any more.

It’s just that that line applies so well to one of my lifelong goals.

On my family’s vacations each summer we went to a lot of different locations across the country.  For each one my parents made up a rough itinerary long before we even left.  We did a lot of fun things like visiting a lot of major league baseball stadiums.  But we also had a requirement that there must be at least one thing educational during each vacation.  It usually ended up that we would do lots of things with educational value.

Maybe the most inspirational thing we did was going to a lot of national parks.  I have one of those "passports" from the park system in which you collect ink stamps.  For every national park, you go in to the visitor center, and usually in the gift shop they have a place where you can get your passport stamped.  My parents got it for me when I was really young.  I don't even remember going to a lot of the places I have stamps for.  It is a lifelong goal of mine to eventually get a stamp from every national park.  After that’s done I’ll work on finishing off the lesser national "parks" like monuments, preserves, etc.

I regret that I didn’t have my passport with me when I was in Yosemite about two years ago.  That’s no big deal though.  That was such a beautiful park that I'm sure I’ll make sure to stop by again sometime.

Speaking of national park gift shops, this reminds me of a parable from Colorado.  For some reason that year I was obsessed with buying quite a few glossy coffee table type books with my vacation money.  My brother didn't.  He wasted his on candy, usually rock candy from the gift shops.  He didn't get the reward I got for being responsible with my money.  It was near the end of our Colorado vacation and we had been to a lot of national parks because the state is full of them.  I was going to buy the book about Arches National Park.  Mom and Dad had to do some conniving to convince me that I really didn't want to do that.  There's nothing there but rocks.  It's not very interesting, etc.  Of course, little did I know that Mom and Dad had already bought that one for me as my reward for doing something responsible.