The Only Souvenir I’ve Purchased In Years
I’m usually not a souvenir person, but I made an exception this time
I guess I’m really getting this one in under the wire with only two days to spare (my apologies to the Globetrotters editors)!
As I’ve mentioned in some of my other stories, I’m really not much of a souvenir person. They take up room that I don’t have in my luggage (or frankly in my life as a frequent nomad), plus I generally can’t afford things that I don’t really need while traveling. So initially I didn’t think I’d have anything to write about for this month’s challenge.
But that changed last week. After spending the day in Great Sand Dunes National Park in Colorado (a separate story about that coming soon), I decided to look around the visitor center and gift shop. Like I said, I almost never buy anything at gift shops, but I do occasionally look around. Sometimes, there are interesting books, for example, collections of Ansel Adams photographs — and I’ll never turn down an opportunity to skim those. Someday if I have a coffee table to put it on, I’m going to buy one of those books.
This time when I entered the shop, however, I remembered something that a couple of writers (shoutout to Michael Rhodes and Erika Burkhalter) had mentioned in the comments of one of my previous national parks stories. The national parks sell passports that you can stamp to keep track of all the parks you’ve visited. Since it’s my goal to visit all of them, I thought this would be a terrific way to keep track.
And, sure enough, behind a couple shelves of t-shirts, stuffed animals, and postcards, there they were. I picked one out, paid for it, and went to stamp it. As you can see from the photos below, I’ve made pretty good progress, as I’ve already added Saguaro and Grand Canyon (though the date on the stamp was clearly wrong) in addition to Great Sand Dunes. Unfortunately, I’m missing the first three parks that I visited before buying this, but I guess that’s a good excuse to go back.
There’s another reason that this is special to me, too. Getting a stamp at each park is in a way the adult equivalent to getting a junior ranger badge, which I always did when I visited national parks as a kid. Though I no longer have those badges, I do have strong memories of completing the tasks in the junior ranger booklets and the pride that came when I was given each new badge upon their completion.
Hopefully, in a few years, I’ll have a similar sense of accomplishment when I’ve filled this passport with all 63 national park stamps.
Be sure to check out the other monthly challenge submissions! It’s hard for me to only choose a couple, but I loved Jillian Amatt - Artistic Voyages story about the small but meaningful souvenirs she’s collected around the world: handcrafted earrings.
Krasi Shapkarova had a somewhat more disappointing experience trying to find a set of nesting dolls like she had as a kid…hopefully, she’ll have better luck next time!
