National Parks Passports
One really fun thing to do if you are going to multiple national parks is to get the passport book. We bought these at Mammoth Cave for our kids, and most of the bigger parks will sell them for about $10. The books come with a map that shows all the national parks, historic sites, and other places that you can stop and collect stamps. There's a plastic folder in the front of the book for you to slip this map into.
Each park has its own special stamp with the date that you visited. Most places you have to ask the ranger to stamp it for you, but at Mammoth Cave they had the stamp out in the gift shop for visitors to do themselves. In addition to the Mammoth Cave stamp, they had little bat stamps here, so I put two of those in each kid’s book. Occasionally a park might pre-stamp paper and then you will have to tape it into your book in the correct spot rather than stamping directly in the book. I have a feeling I’ll be more excited about collecting stamps than the kids are.
The passports are divided into regions (Southeast, Southwest, etc.) and each park has been sorted into a region. So when you get your stamp, you just add it to that section of the book. This means that depending on your route, you may have parts of the book that are full of stamps and other sections that are empty.
There are also stickers you can put in the passports, but I’m not a huge fan of how these work. The park system has published a set of stickers each year starting in 1986 that includes one park from each region. So you can’t just buy the sticker for the park you are at; you have to buy the whole sheet for about $5.
Luckily, the gift shop still had a few sheets from the 1991 set with the Mammoth Cave stamp. But the other parks on the sheet are from all over the country and we aren’t going to most of those anytime soon. I hate to break up the sticker sheet from nearly thirty years ago, and I also hate to put stickers in the passports for places we haven’t been. So at the moment, I’m just putting stamps in the books and collecting the stickers separately. The stickers are much harder to find, as well, because a lot of the smaller parks and historic sites won't carry any at all. Maybe I’ll add the stickers someday, but for now, I'm happy with stamps. I bought two sets of the 1991 sticker sheet, just in case I decide to open one or both.
