Enter a gift shop in a national park and your senses are overwhelmed with memorabilia for sale that years down the road will, hopefully, remind you of your vacation. What do you look for?
There are hats to collect, T-shirts, and hiking stick medallions. Then, too, there are even scrapbook supplies, puzzles, guidebooks, field journals, coffee cups, and framed photographs by photographers who, most often, are better shooters than we are. Some gift shops offer commemorative wool blankets, jewelry, and beer glasses.
Do any of these items interest you? Do you focus on one aspect of park memorabilia -- hats or the hiking stick medallions, perhaps -- to track your national park visits?
Comments
My husband always has to have a pin and a patch. The kids always get a stamp in their passport and on their junior ranger books, in addition to any junior ranger badge they earn. My son will sometimes get a spoon or something else that catches his eye. I like to get postcards, with dreams of scrapbooking them some time. I love to buy what I can in the gift shop to support the parks and have a tangible memory of fun times.
My daughter and I collect stamps in our passports and pins from every park. We display the pins on lanyards and on our bedroom curtains. The lanyards hang from a hat rack in my daughters room and she can see them whenever she wants to. I also collect the maps from every park. I have a box that is almost full already.
We look for lapel pins and patches to decorate our Bauble Boards with! I also like to keep the maps and use them as background papers for scrapbooks.
Postcards (I'm covering my RV cabinets with them). Christmas ornaments and passport stamps. I used to collect key rings, hung them like charms on a long braided rope bracelet & draped it over a mirror until it got too heavy. Pottery and other local art work is very special. I too want to buy at the VC to support the parks & local artists. The memories associated with each item is priceless.
I collect stamps in my passport book, postcards, bookmarks, calendars, and magnets from every park. I display the magnets on my office filing cabinets so I can escape anytime of the day and I get to choose a different bookmark everytime I begin a new book.
It's patches for me...and Passport stamps...and if there is a cool old-style poster, that's mine, too. I have the patches on 2 backpacks that I hike with...the only problem is deciding which one to take! Someday, they will probably all get sewn onto a blanket or something...maybe a sleeping bag.
I usually get magnets and sometimes ornaments. I have collected, but can't seem to find anymore at the National Parks, are the 8" square ceramic tiles to hang on my kitchen wall. I have collected five tiles from Glacier National Park and one each from Zion NP, Acadia NP, Yosemite NP, Bass Harbor, and Montana Huckleberry. Our goal is to visit all the National Parks, (which we have visited most) and decorate the kitchen wall with the tiles, but these are the only ones that I have found.
Thanks for making me laugh Laran :) See his/her post above.
We collect the park pins but instead of putting them on a hat or vest we take cut off the back part, glue a piece of magnet strip on it and put it on our frige in the motorhome. It's a great reminder of all our trips and usually cheaper than the magnets in the store :) Oh and we take lots of pictures that popup as our screen saver on our laptop.