What’s all this about stamps and stamp books?

May 17, 2011

Looking back at all of our blogs during the loooong trip to Missouri, we have talked a lot about getting stamps in our books. When we realized that most people won’t know what we are talking about, we thought we should probably explain what it really is, so here goes.

A few years ago, someone introduced us to the National Parks Passport Books which have information about all of the National Parks, National Monuments, National Historic Sites, National Rivers, and on and on and on. Well, our book looks like this:

Each National site we visit has one or more rubber stamps that go in the appropriate place in the book. There are sections for Pacific Northwest and Alaska, Western, Rocky Mountain, Southwest, etc. – all the way to the North Atlantic. In each section there are pages for the stamps as well as for extra stickers for the site we visit. We purchase the sets of stickers extra. The pages look like this when they are completed:

And the stamps look like this:

This year marks the 25th anniversary of the National Parks stamps program, so most stops include the anniversary stamp (like the one on the left above), and we have just begun our quest.
Study these carefully because there could be a quiz tomorrow!

Since we are parked and basically being lazy, there isn’t much else to report on.  More from the rolling cave houses of the Bedrock Bunch later.