Current State of Affairs

Portsmouth, VA

August 31, 2007

-FrankieT


Well, maybe we should start with a little background information. It all started for me with a seemingly innocuous visit in October 2005 to Fort Frederica, an unremarkable NPS unit on St. Simon's Island in Georgia. I was visiting my sister and her family in St. Mary's, a town about 30 miles south of St Simon's and we were looking for a day trip that didn't involve Jacksonville. A brief deliberation ensued and we made the decision to drive to St. Simon's, not even knowing that a national park site existed there. After touring the local lighthouse and combing the beach for about an hour, we stumbled upon a sign for Fort Frederica National Monument. With little else to do, we made our way to the visitor center and, while the rest of the crew used the facilities, I started to make my way around the exhibits.

Now, I had been to several national park sites prior to this one and even made it a point to stop whenever possible in the event that I saw the telltale brown sign on the highway. However, let me make it clear that I had never made an organized effort to visit national park sites in my travels and, honestly, didn't even know what sites were affiliated with the National Park Service (for example, I did not know that the Washington Monument was a National Park site). As I made my way around this visitor center, nothing would suggest that my haphazard method of incidentally visiting National Park sites was about to change.

The exhibits in the center were informative and the story moderately interesting (the British and Spanish clashed here during the colonial days of Georgia's existence) but there was nothing remarkable about the site and certainly nothing that would spark a lifelong quest to visit all 391 National Park units. However, as I was making my way to the door, I stopped to ask the ranger on duty about touring the fort outside. In the process of getting this information, I noticed a small display on the counter advertising the Passport to Your National Parks. I proceeded to flip through the small sample book and examined the adjacent stamper, stopping to make an impression on a scrap piece of paper. I thought to myself that this was interesting and made a mental note to look this up on the internet when I got back to my sister's house. I had not yet purchased a Passport book nor had I even collected my first stamp, but I consider this to be the beginning of my quest to visit all 391 (and counting) National Park units.

For those of you that don't know about the National Park system, my subsequent research back at my sister's house revealed several things. At the time, there were 388 sites in the National Park system that were considered 'units' for the purposes of management and visitation (there are now 391). Each of these units (with a few exceptions) participates in the Passport to Your National Parks program in which they are assigned a unique stamp (and sometimes several site-specific stamps) that one can collect in their proprietary Passport book (or medium of your choice). These units preserve, protect and interpret the natural (my favorite), historical and cultural resources of all aspects of our country.

Now I realize that collecting impressions of stamps may seem boring and tedious and, in all honesty, this sometimes is the case. However, the framework that these stamps provide in which to visit some amazing places is the real reward. In the pursuit of collecting and, more importantly, earning these stamps, I have accumulated some incredible experiences and some pleasant surprises. The stamps act as a sort of philatelic travel agent for experiencing the United States and its territories while also providing an indelible record of these visitations.

In my quest to visit all 391 NPU's and collect their associated stamp impressions, I have unofficially anointed myself as a missionary for this program. My first convert was fellow blogger George Boneillo. He was an easy sell as he had just returned from Grand Canyon National Park and had actually visited more National Park sites than I had. As in my case, he shared an appreciation for the National Park system but also had previously lacked the framework from which to launch this interest. Of course, this noble pursuit soon devolved into a latent competition that persists to this day. More recent to the pursuit is blog creator Stefan Heinemann, also an aficionado of the National Park Service but less convinced about the Passport program (at least until recently). After intense peer pressure and several National Park trips in which he stamped random pieces of paper, Stefan finally succumbed and purchased a book of his own. That is where we stand now and the quest is just beginning.