Visiting America's National Parks

 

I just put together a collaborative presentation on national parks for my camera club, and it reminded me how important it is to visit our country’s national wonders.

There are 63 national parks, and Roland and I counted up the number we had visited. We’re not sure we got them all, but we saw at least six with the children and at least ten additional ones by ourselves, either before they were born or after they grew up. While that sounds like a lot, it is only about a quarter of America’s national parks.

I’ve been to a few more because my family traveled all over the country when I was a child, but I don’t remember all of them. There were also some duplicates, such as the Grand Canyon and Yellowstone.

The photo at the head of this post is the well-known Old Faithful geyser at Yellowstone National Park. I took it and the following photo from the Mammoth Springs area of the park during my visit there with Roland in 2005.

In 2014, Roland accompanied me on a research trip for Desert Jewels. Roland had never been to the Grand Canyon, and, since we were going to be sort-of in that area, we added it to the itinerary. This photo was taken from the east side of the rim, and that’s the Colorado River at the bottom.

A year ago we drove out to visit Roland’s sister in Arizona. Along the way, we visited two national parks and a national monument. The national parks were both in New Mexico. The next photo is a rock formation inside Carlsbad Caverns, which I call a stone waterfall. The one after that was taken at White Sands National Park and shows a dry lake bed that apparently has a little water in it for one or two months a year but not during September when we were there.

The National Park System includes more than just national parks, however, for a total of 431 locations. We have visited many of the national monuments, battlefields, and other historic sites on the list—some with and some without the children. Although I have limited space here, I am including photos of two of the 86 national monuments. The first is Wupatki National Monument in Arizona, which we visited on our way back from Sue’s house last year. The second is from our 2005 trip to Yellowstone and needs no introduction.

It would have been nice to include some photos of the many national parks, monuments, and battlefields that we visited with the children while they were growing up, but those photos were taken with film. I’m simply too lazy to dig through boxes of prints to find them.

I highly recommend visiting America’s national parks. In fact, any site within the  national park system is well worth seeing. Go to www.nps.gov to find information on particular locations.

If you are a senior (62 or more) or a veteran, you can get a lifetime pass. The senior lifetime pass is $80, but that is well worth the money if you plan on going to several places. Roland and I both purchased senior lifetime passes because we didn’t realize we only needed one. A pass is valid for everyone in the holder’s car when the entrance fee is per car and for a total of four persons when the entrance fee is per person. It does have the customer’s name on it, though, so if two spouses each plan on doing some independent travel, then maybe getting two is worth it.

There is also a free lifetime pass for veterans, which also covers all the occupants of the car or three individuals besides the veteran. If we had realized that, we would have saved even more money. Even so, what we did spend has already been worth it.

Here is a link to the page with information about passes.

Entrance Passes (U.S. National Park Service) (nps.gov)

If you are planning a vacation and don’t know where to go, check out the national park system.

 

Customs Change Over Time

 

I just re-read the first three books in the Cherry Ames series by Helen Wells. For those of you who don’t know, Cherry Ames was part of the craze for series about older teenage girls that started with Nancy Drew. Cherry was a nursing student and then a nurse rather than an amateur detective like Nancy, so most of the series takes place when she was a young adult. Although Cherry did solve some mysteries, they were secondary to her life as a nurse.

When I was a girl, my family occasionally stayed with my Uncle Lester and his family. My cousin Ann was four years older than I was and away in college during my high school years, so I slept in her room several times. One of the things I liked about it was Ann’s collection of Cherry Ames books, which I got to read while I was there.

Ann went to medical school and became a doctor, so many years later I asked her why she read books about a nurse instead of a doctor. If I’m remembering it correctly, Ann said she wanted stories with a medical setting and the Cherry Ames books were the best she could get.

By the time Ann started medical school, it was already the late 1960s and female doctors weren’t as unusual as they had been. Fiction hadn’t caught up with the times, however.

This isn’t a criticism of the Cherry Ames books. Nursing is a noble profession, and society needs nurses as well as doctors. Those first books in the series were consistent with the state of the medical profession when they were written and published in the 1940s. Although there are no female doctors or male nurses in them, there is also no suggestion that those roles are inappropriate and, for all I know, female doctors and male nurses may have appeared later in the series. Furthermore, I believe those books were written the way they should have been. Even though they were not historical fiction when they were written, they were set during World War II and have become historicals simply by occurring in an easily identifiable historical setting.

I strongly believe that historical fiction should reflect the time it is set in. Many of my novels include beliefs and actions that are not popular today. For example, Learning to Surrender has a protagonist who believes in slavery during much of the book until circumstances show her the evils that exist even for slaves with “good” masters.

This doesn’t mean that historicals can’t give a nod to today’s thinking, but it must flow with the story. A good example is Tenmile by Sandra Dallas, which takes place in 1880. The protagonist often helps her doctor father, and people tell her that she would be a good nurse. Nobody except the housekeeper encourages her to become a doctor, although the protagonist’s father seems to be wavering in his opinion when the story ends. The protagonist is still too young to become either a doctor or a nurse, but the reader has learned there is a medical school that takes women, and we are confident that will be the protagonist’s future. The prevailing opinion among the people in the story is consistent with the times, however.

Don’t get me wrong. I have no problem with books that intentionally change history and admit it, and temporarily misleading information is often crucial to a plot during the course of a novel. But if you want readers to come away believing your historical setting is correct, you should make sure it is.

Always respect the reader.