When I started putting together a plan for the year, with a goal of focusing on one park and issue each month, I was thinking July would be Denali -- partly because I've never been to any of Alaska's national parks, partly because Mom wanted to go there.
She has been taking a trip to a national park each year with a group of girlfriends. But for 2012, they couldn't agree on a place. Mom's friends wanted to go the Everglades. She already had been there. She wanted to go to Denali. Her friends didn't want to. So they were going to take a year off.
I mentioned this to Dayton Duncan, the writer...
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I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who offered condolences about my mom. Thanks for the cards, calls, emails, donations, flowers and -- in many cases -- stories about your rocks.
A few days after I wrote about my mom and Mia and the book, "Everybody Needs a Rock," I found a package on my doorstep. It was about the size of a toaster, but heavier. When I opened it up, beneath a card and in the middle of crumpled newspaper, there was a rock, slightly larger than a baseball and full of subtle colors. It was a from a friend who moved from Jacksonville to Maine a few years ago. On the bottom,...
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First a confession: I had low expectations for Yellowstone.
I included it in the mix of parks to visit this year not necessarily because it was a place atop the list of ones I really wanted to see, but because I figured if I'm trying to write about the future of national parks I really should visit the world's first one.
I went to Yellowstone as a kid, as part of a long, cross-country journey. And while I have vivid memories of some of the other national places we hit on that trip -- Grand Canyon, Redwood, Lassen -- I don't remember much of anything about Yellowstone other than Old Faithful...
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As her cousins raced down a path in Yellowstone National Park a couple of weeks ago, Mia lagged behind. She was upset. I don't even remember exactly what she was upset about, just that it was the kind of meltdown that is an age-old staple of family trips.
Anyone who has ever gone on a Griswolds-like cross-country trip, either as a child or parent, knows about such inevitable drama. I'm still not sure how my parents had the will and patience to pile three kids in the back of a station wagon (one without air-conditioning or a radio) and drive a few thousand miles, hitting national parks, Wall...
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