For Danny Bernstein, retirement is best enjoyed by following a path through the woods or a tour through a unit of the National Park System. Whether the park in question is focused on history, or culture, or natural beauty doesn't matter. For Ms. Bernstein, being in the park system and enjoying and learning from it are the important keys.

And equally important is sharing those experiences with family, friends, and even any strangers who might show up to follow her on a hike through Great Smoky Mountains National Park in North Carolina and Tennessee, where she leads hikes for the Great Smoky Mountains Association.

While the Smokies is her home park, Ms. Bernstein has traveled, and continues to travel, extensively through the park system. In a bid to share those experiences with others curious about the parks, she has just released Forests, Alligators, Battlefields: My Journey Through The National Parks Of The South, her latest book.

Though it might be cataloged as a nature guidebook, this is not your typical guidebook. She doesn't start out the sections on the parks she visited with lists of information, such as the park's address and Internet URL, or lists of trails, or best times of year to visit. Rather, the approach is as if you sat down with a good friend who regaled you with their travels through the parks.

Through this storytelling approach, Ms. Bernstein mixes varying amounts of history, interpretation, first-person experiences, and personal reflection to explore units as diverse as Chattahoochee River National Recreation Area and Virgin Islands National Park. There's no cookie-cutter formula at play here, and so some chapters are shorter, or longer, than others, depending on what strikes her. Which is why you're not likely to find the following, taken from her entry on Virgin Islands National Park, in any other guidebook:

Cinnamon Bay attracts many family groups. In the campsite next to us, a Danish family with three young children seems to spend all their time around the picnic table. We see them here when we leave in the morning and still sitting when we return. The two elementary-school-age children do homework, supervised by the father. The mother bathes the six-month-old girl in a dishwashing bucket.

One evening, I go over and introduce myself.

"How long are you here for?" I ask.

"We're taking several months to visit the three islands," the father says. He's a college professor on sabbatical. The mom smiles but doesn't speak much English.

"Looking for your ancestors?"

"No," the dad says. "Just showing our children their heritage."

After talking to several visitors, I realize that Lenny and I are an anomaly because we're only staying in St. John for three days. Everyone we meet is on the island for at least a week, most for a couple of weeks to a couple of months.

"But what do you do for two months?" I ask.

"We relax, swim,and putter."

It's this sort of discourse, U-turns far from the general flow found in most guidebooks, that works so well in Forest, Alligators, Battlefields. We get to know both the park units Ms. Bernstein visits ... and sometimes even those who visit. Sure, the impressions and viewpoints are the author's. But then, what's wrong with that? When you're preparing for a vacation, you ask a friend who has been to the destination you're heading to for advice, right? Ms. Bernstein has much to share.

Running nearly 300 pages -- and with a section on the author's experience in becoming an interpreter at Great Smoky Mountains -- Forest, Alligators, Battlefields offers a wonderful introduction to parks in the South. And it's a book you don't need to read chronologically. Feel free to skip around to the specific park you're planning to visit, and return to the book when you're off to another park.