National Parks

When we took Cameron to the Everglades, he bought a National Parks passport book to collect stamps and stickers from different parks. It also gave him a little bit of information about each park, why it was important, and where it was located. His first stamp was obviously an alligator from the Everglades National Park.

On the way home from our trip, we talked about all of the other National Parks that we had already visited. Many of them were located in Washington DC and Philadelphia. There were others, however, like Lincoln‘s home in Springfield, Illinois, that we had toured as well. I told Cameron that it would be great if we could collect stickers and/or stamps from those parks also, but I wasn’t quite sure how to do that. He agreed that it would be neat to fill the book with at least the places that we had already been.

This past week I started doing some research on how to collect stickers or stamps from previous visits .  The National Parks had a website where I could order stickers, but they didn’t have each individual park. I would have to buy sheets of stickers and that didn’t make sense to me as I didn’t need stickers to parks that we had not been to or probably would never visit. Thankfully, I was able to locate individual stickers from eight parks that we had visited, so I ordered those.  There were still 20 others that I would love to have some type of stamper sticker from to put in our book.

As I’ve done in the past, I decided to turn to eBay. I thought maybe someone would have a collection of stickers for sale. Instead, I found a woman, just like us, who had bought her passport book after she visited a lot of the parks. She was also disappointed that she didn’t get stamps or stickers from them, so she created her own stamp that she could individualize with the park names and dates. I got super excited as the cost was extremely reasonable and a lot less than buying my own stamp making kit.

Doug and I made a list of all of the National Parks that we had visited over the years with our children. During the last few days, I searched through stacks of pictures so that I knew the date on our trips as well. I made a spreadsheet and once I found information on all 20 different parks, I contacted the lady from eBay. She told me exactly how to order the stamps and soon, I had all the information to her. Within a couple of hours, she had already made the stamps and sent a proof to me before she shipped them. I know that they won’t be authentic, but I am still extremely happy about filling our book with stamps from all of our family trips. 

As an added bonus, it was also a lot of fun walking down memory lane while looking through the pictures. We took a lot of great vacations with our children and they got to see some wonderful places in the United States. I am so glad that we were able to share our love of travel with them.