I thought I had said all the tings I wanted to say about Excellent Things in Part 1 and Part 2 But I thought of one more excellent thing I wanted to share:

7. My U.S. National Park Passport. At most National Parks you can get a stamp (the kind you imprint, not the kind you lick or peel) with the name of the park and the date of your visit. The park service calls these “cancellations.” The cancellations are freely available at the visitor center, ranger station or shop of most parks. The park service sells an inexpensive spiral-bound book that you can collect the stamps in. I often forget to take mine on trips, so many of my stamps are stamped on receipts and taped into the book later. I consider these paste-ups second-rate — they are better than nothing, but I always wish I had remembered my passport. You can also buy stamps (the kind that you peel) to stick in the book–every year they print one national stamp and one for each park region. I guess the idea is that you save the stamps and then get cancellations of them at the parks. The stamps are of no interest to me — it’s the cancellations that I’m after. We’re planning a vacation to the Outer Banks soon, and not only am I going to make sure and take my passport to get a stamp at the Wright Brothers National Memorial, but I’m also going to buy a US Lighthouse Society passport so that I can collect lighthouse cancellations as well.

I really like these tiny, inky, often blurry mementos of trips to our National Parks. The full spaces remind me of fun trips (and often of scavenger-hunt like difficulties in finding the stamps — there are whole websites devoted to where and how to find them at various parks). The blank spaces in the book remind me of the treasures our country holds, many of which I will probably never see, but this tiny book is a useful reminder that they are there.

My Excellent Things series of posts is a meme started by NowThis — if you are interested, just write about people, places, food, songs, things, whatever. I’d really like to know what things you consider excellent.