May 05, 2004

National Parks

If you're traveling within the country this summer, here's a list of National Park experiences compiled by the National Park Foundation. Click to get more info including links to the individual park sites.

  • Best place to watch a sunrise - Cadillac Mountain, Acadia National Park, Maine
  • Best photo opportunity - Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho
  • Best beach - Olympic National Park, Washington State
  • Best "watering hole" - Jackson Lake, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming
  • Best place to take a date - Wolf Trap National Park for the Performing Arts, Virginia
  • Best access to breathtaking beauty - Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado
  • Best proud moment - Tuskegee Airmen National Historic Site, Alabama
  • Best place to see fossils - Carlsbad Caverns National Park, New Mexico
  • Best stargazing - Glacier National Park, Montana
  • Best place to experience goosebumps - Antietam National Battlefield, Maryland
  • Best setting for a wedding - Chapel at Yosemite National Park, California

Hmm. I've been to Yellowstone, Olympic, Grand Teton, Carlsbad, and Yosemite. I may have been to Antietam on the way to or from Gettysburg, but I don't remember it. Wolf Trap may have been under construction while I lived in the area, but I don't think it had fully opened by the time we headed West in 1968. I saw Yellowstone and Jackson Hole on that cross-country trip. I went to Olympic on an Oregon-Washington coast driving vacation back in 1986; Yosemite was part of a similar vacation in 1985. I've seen Carlsbad at least twice, once in 1962 (again on a cross-country trip, this time heading East) and again in 1992.

Time to get out the Parks Life List again.

Posted by Linkmeister at May 5, 2004 03:40 PM
Comments

Let me try to jog your memory about Antietam...

Do the terms Dunker Church, Cornfield, Sunken Road, and, most emblematic of all, Burnside's Bridge ring a bell? Viewing it not too long after the Burns series, I really did get the goosebumps predicted by the NPF. Gettysburg too, but the single-day Antietam battle is much easier to get your mind around than the three day ebb-and-flow of Gettysburg.

Posted by: N in Seattle at May 5, 2004 10:30 PM

I might have been 12 or 13, so it was a long time ago. Sunken Road sounds familiar, though.

Posted by: Linkmeister at May 5, 2004 10:37 PM

I've been to several of the Parks, but would love to just see them all. I'd also like to see the Grand Canyon, and have never made it. I saw it by air once, but that hardly counts.

Cas

Posted by: cassie-b at May 6, 2004 11:15 AM